For most couples, ‘date night’ is something to look forward to, but unfortunately does not come around often enough. For others, even the word ‘date’ sends a chill down their spine. It’s not an adverse reaction to their partner, but rather a unpleasant reminder to the daily toil that is working with DATE formatted data in their relational database. Wow, that opening segue was more awkward than my first date with my wife…which is another…
A better title might be ‘Tools are Too Cool for School’ or ‘If you don’t use Tools You are Dumber Than a Caveman’ or…well, you get the idea I think. My focus of course falls squarely in the IT and RDBMS domain. It is also not a huge secret that I spend a lot of time advocating a specific database tool for a little independent software company. I want to take a step back this…
Someone suggested I document where, who, and what I use to get things done in my day-to-day dealings with all things Oracle RDBMS. Since I am very open to suggestion, here it is: Official Stuff Unofficial Stuff Twitter Folks Updated Dec 14, 2014 Oracle Docs Official Link Oracle’s official online documentation. I generally just ‘Google’ the term I’m interested in alongside the keyword ‘Oracle.’ Nine times out of 10 (unscientific gut feeling), the Oracle Docs…
Twitter came through for me in a big way again today. I’m constantly being asked why I do ‘the Twitter’, and this experience sums it up nicely. Updated 10-05-2010 First things first. # – denotes a hashtag, useful for finding/categorizing posts on Twitter FTW – acronym for ‘For the Win’, geeky way of saying ‘Woohoo!’ I am an idiot. I recently bought a wiring harness for my car stereo, this was going to let me…
So this was my 3rd Oracle Open World, and not much has changed in terms of my experience as a ‘booth boy’ in the Vendor Exhibition Hall. However a few things definitely got my attention. I will need to re-evaluate how I treat the opportunity to attend this conference going forward. I should get registered as a blogger I should attend the blogger meet-up I should meet @jpiwowar in-the-flesh I should wrangle my way into…
I recently had the opportunity to attend a SQL Saturday event, #46 in Raleigh, NC. Techie Training, on a Saturday. Really? Yes, really. And I had some reservations before attending. However the fact that this event was free, minus $10 for breakfast/lunch, and the entire #SQL universe on Twitter has had nothing but good things to say about the event convinced me to give it a shot. Why does an Oracle guy care about SQL…
Microsoft has a lot to be proud of. They helped pioneer desktop computing. They have very successful platforms like SQL Server and Sharepoint. They are even working on a new mobile phone that doesn’t support copy and paste. But, I would argue their most popular product in use today is Excel. Mayhaps ‘popular’ isn’t the best word here. Most reasonable people will probably agree that Excel is the predominant number crunching tool in the marketplace.…
On Thursday, September 30, 10:30AM EST, Bert Scalzo and I will be doing a Quest sponsored Webcast – “DBAs Versus Developers.” Sign Up/Register for the Webcast That sounds awfully contentious, Jeff! When visiting customers I am often talking to a group of developers in the morning and DBAs in the afternoon. In the morning, I tell my DBA jokes. In the afternoon, I make friends by piling on the developers. From time to time we…
I spend a lot of time speaking to PL/SQL development teams. A conservative estimate would break down to about 200 presentations a year and 2,000 developers. I have several stock presentations, but I prefer to have conversations with my audience rather than just start throwing slides up on the projector. If we find a topic of interest, then I can jump into presentation mode. When I get desperate for audience participation, I’ll start throwing concepts…
I have never been really good at telling people ‘No.’ Let me clarify that – I have never been really good at telling people I work with ‘No.’ This trait put me in an interesting position recently when both @BrentO and @CHasker Instant Messaged me at work. Apparently I was the lucky guy to run Quest’s new Wiki/Blog site, OraDBPedia. If you are plugged into the wacky world of SQL Server, then you know all…