Category: Miscellaneous

Oracle gave me an unexpected present for Christmas this year by naming me an Oracle ACE! I’m truly honored to be included in the ranks of so many I’ve read and learned from. Of course I’m also extremely happy to know my efforts to return the favor and share my knowledge and experience has been…

What’s it take to be a good developer? Brains? Of course you have to be able to think. Logic? Sure, you need to have logical constructions. Detailed? Maybe, you do need to pick out the intricacies of requirements. Thorough? Yeah, I’ll give you that. The cause of all bugs is failing to cover some scenario.…

Like everyone else, I make mistakes. While the results can sometimes be unfortunate, it’s also a truth that shouldn’t be ignored. A recurring problem though is that as a designated “expert” sometimes people don’t bother to test what I’ve given them. They just roll with it and then are surprised when their production installation goes…

I’m flying out tomorrow for Collaborate 16. Looking forward to another great conference. I’m presenting again this year. I’ll be speaking on Tuesday, at 2:15 “Why Developers Need to Think like DBAs, Why DBAs Need to Think like Developers” Session 1355 in Jasmine C

A little while ago Oracle announced the winners of the Oracle Database Developer Choice Awards and I was a winner in both of categories I was nominated, SQL and PL/SQL I was surprised and overjoyed when I was notified that I had not only been nominated; but named a finalist. I’m truly humbled by the…

If you haven’t voted yet, please do so soon! Voting ends 3pm US/Pacific time. I’ve been nominated in the SQL and PL/SQL categories https://community.oracle.com/community/database/awards/sql-voting https://community.oracle.com/community/database/awards/plsql-voting

Yesterday Kim Berg Hansen posted a couple entries to his blog about scraping and parsing the Oracle Developer Choice Awards voting pages and building summaries of the results. I’ve been doing something similar since the voting began but took a slightly different approach. I do like the idea of storing them in a table to…

Yesterday I was happily surprised by an email from Steven Feuerstein letting me know I hadn’t responded to my finalist announcement. Well, the reason for that was I never saw it! I’m glad he let me know though, what an honor. I am a finalist in both the SQL and PL/SQL categories. If you’ve enjoyed…

Looking forward to another great conference. I’ll presenting again this year, this time doing two sessions: What an Oracle Developer Ought to Know Why Developers Need to Think Like DBAs, Why DBAs Need to Think Like Developers

Last week was the 5 year anniversary of answering my first question on Experts Exchange and on Monday of this week I answered my 6000th question. With coincidental milestones like that it seems like a good time to reflect on what I’ve accomplished since I started participating. In that time I’ve also published 13 articles,…