In case you missed the great discussion in the comments on my post from last week, “Oracle ACE program “almost completely worthless,’” check out some highlights from the fray:

Useless? Not really . . . you get a free pass to OpenWorld. –Laurent Schneider

Oracle may well believe that it is nothing more than a badge for those who advocate Oracle, etc. However, some ACEs obviously see it as a meaningful and well-deserved Oracle accreditation of their amazing skills . . . Now that the “truth is out there,” I would expect any real Oracle pro who has an ACE award to send it back, and do something to rid themselves of the title. Including HJR! –John

I’m always suspicious of these self proclaimed ‘gurus.’ Most of them, in my experience, are your stereotypical glory hunters. The type who has to be the center of attention. “O look at me, I wrote a book” . . . “O look at me, I’m so underutilized at my job that I’ve had time to respond 5,000 times on OTN.” Smug, arrogant, full of their own sense of self importance and quite irritating. –Steve

Last December I received an ACE award. I have no clue who nominated me, or on what basis I was rewarded an ACE award . . . My first reaction when I received this award was: someone is making fun of me, this cannot be true. –Jacco Landlust

In plain language, it used to be a requirement to have technical proficiency to be an ACE, but that requirement has been dropped and transferred to the ACE Director level instead. That is why I called my original piece ‘Devalued.’ It’s got nothing to do with wanting to sneer at the peasants, look down my nose at people, etc. etc. It’s just an observation that when I got my ACE it meant one thing and now it means something else. –Howard Rogers

Thanks to all for commenting on this issue, especially Howard who raised the topic in the first place.

-Elisa

Howard Rogers at Dizwell Informatics claims, with a sort-of apology to everyone he’s “unintentionally” insulting, that the Oracle ACE program, which used to mean something, “has been rendered almost completely worthless.”

Says he:

There’s a bunch of complete nobodies who nominated themselves for starters and got approved despite a paucity of any demonstrated technical skill or community contribution at all. […] In fact, it turns out that you can be a technically incompetent looney and still be an ACE, because all you now have to do to be an ACE is present a lot, write a lot, have OCP certification and be on the beta program … and there’s no mention of anyone, anywhere actually vetting any of that writing or presentation for technical accuracy. […] I am reminded of the fact that there was once a time when, albeit briefly, OCP actually meant something, too.

Ouchy. Sounds like Oracle certifications and awards are undergoing something akin to degree inflation, whereby “degrees are conferred on people who have not learned all they should have learned in order to earn their degrees” – and furthermore, it eventually becomes a necessity to have these credentials as a baseline (just to get hired), so that more and greater qualifications are required in order to stand out from the crowd.

What do you think? Is the Oracle ACE designation effectively meaningless now? Does it say anything about real technical knowledge and ability?

-Elisa

Jack Loftus at the Enterprise Linux Log asks, “Does Oracle 11g mean more Linux?” I.e., why did Oracle choose to release the new Database 11g on Linux first? Sure, Linux is “here to stay” (blah blah), but can we dig a little deeper?

Loftus spoke to an analyst about whether Oracle is just “making bank off Linux” (a “huge moneymaker” for Oracle) or if it’s positioning itself against Microsoft (whose SQL Server offering is hot right now). According to Forrester Research analyst Noel Yuhanna, Windows customers are a “lost cause” to Oracle – they’re happy with SQL Server and aren’t likely to switch. So Oracle may be angling for more Linux customers (and more Unbreakable Linux support revenue), while at the same time avoiding any more lost market share to Microsoft SQL Server.

Read Loftus’s full post.

And if you’re not totally sick of 11g yet, check out Eddie Awad’s list of 40+ links to blogs on Oracle 11g.

-Elisa

Several in the Oracle blogosphere (including Doug Burns, Niall Litchfield and Paul Vallee) note that the Oracle WTF blog has been hijacked. Theory is that the blog was first marked as a spam blog by Google and subsequently deleted. Litchfield quotes the criteria for spam blogs (they “can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text”) and wonders if “the whole purpose of blogging” isn’t irrelevant nonsense. Certainly posts full of SQL code might look repetitive and nonsensical to a dumb robot (or to me).

Ironically, according to a Computerworld article, Google recently mistook its own Custom Search Blog for a spam blog, allowing it to be similarly hijacked. Doh! Silly Blogger. . . .

And speaking of spam, our office is getting hammered with unusual amounts of it today – messages that are getting past our filters. Seems to be a global problem – Bob Sullivan at the Red Tape Chronicles describes how spammers have most recently gotten the best of all of us by hiding spam within Adobe Acrobat attachments. Doh! Those wily spammers. . . .

-Elisa

A DBA recently wrote in to our Ask the Experts section with the following question:

How can I convince my top management that the time to upgrade all our production Oracle 9i (9.2.0.4) databases to Oracle 10g is now? They are looking for the top five reasons to upgrade. How can I prepare a convincing report?

Our expert’s response reminded me of the Doug Burns post I pointed to last week on workload metrics — wherein he wrote, “The reason you want the metrics will define your approach to gathering them.”

Michael Hillenbrand gets at the same thing when he writes, “In order to write a good business case for an upgrade, you need to know yourself why you want to upgrade.”

In other words, there is no definitive list of the top five reasons to upgrade your Oracle databases, because (all together now) it depends.

But Michael does supply a framework for building a business case to management, starting with the fact that managers want to see benefits weighed against cost in all cases. He also names support as a great reason to upgrade, since 9i will be desupported soon.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself before you go to management with your own list of reasons to upgrade:

• Are there bugs in 9i that are causing outages and/or business impacts?
• Are there features in 10g that would improve the bottom line of the business?
• Do you need to keep up with security patches for compliancy issues, such as SOX or HIPAA?

Sorry guys . . . no answers without more questions. Read Michael’s full response here.

Following up on Mark’s post from last week (“Do Oracle Database innovations really matter?”), check out this article from Computerworld on how DBAs solve problems cheaply. It seems to support the assertion that new features aren’t all that:

Experienced DBAs know that new versions usually pack in more features, meaning that any performance boost is more likely to come from the expensive hardware upgrade accompanying a database upgrade, not the database upgrade itself. And those gains can be limited, if underlying design flaws or operational problems remain.

The article goes on to list some ways you can improve database performance with elbow grease instead of throwing money at the problem, such as fixing bad SQL code (duh) and implementing “intelligent balancing of traffic” for database-backed Web sites.

More links of interest from around the Web . . . Nishant Kaushik of Talking Identity offers an overview of what the Bharosa acquisition adds to Oracle’s access management capabilities, including the addition of contextual and software-based authentication to Oracle Access Manager and improved fraud detection and identity theft protection.

Doug Burns goes over some questions to ask if your manager asks you for workload metrics:

• What do you mean by “workload”?
• How much detail are you looking for?
• Over what time intervals?

And, mostly importantly he says, “Why?” The reason you want the metrics will define your approach to gathering them. (Open questions like this, according to Doug, are what make being a DBA fun.)

Finally, catering to my obsession with all things Google, Andy C charts out which companies have most embraced Facebook. (I’ve started collecting Facebook invitations in lieu of Facebook “friends” . . . I just can’t bring myself to join any social networking sites. Don’t they exist solely so people can waste time at work? IM is bad enough . . . ) Google leads the pack, with almost 52% of employees on Facebook, followed by Yahoo at 34% and Microsoft at 25%. Oracle’s Facebook factor is much lower, just under 6% — only 4,280 Oracle employees out of 74,674. What, Larry Ellison figures he has enough friends already?

Have a good week everybody,
Elisa

According to a recent survey of Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) members, adoption of RAC (Real Application Clusters) and other clustering products is widespread, but grid lags behind. As I reported in my recent story “Grid computing adoption slow amid fears of complexity,” the main reason for this is that users are concerned about the cost and difficulty involved in deploying grid. Are these fears founded?

According to our resident RAC and availability expert, Bill Cullen, these fears aren’t surprising, founded or not:

That doesn’t surprise me at all. Tech managers are always leery of wasting money on the five-dollar solution for the five-cent problem. I’m not saying that’s what Grid is, but that’s what decision makers are fearful of. There is definitely a sense of “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it,” and in many cases I agree. Because there is such a low availability of grid database expertise, I think many managers are scared of the complexity, training costs, and “mucking up” of existing production applications that are working well.

RAC alleviated a lot of existing issues, especially in the arena of higher availability,
and it also was the second generation of a problematic product (Parallel Server) that many people were anxious to get off of. So in this sense it cured the headaches of a lot of managers.

By contrast Grid allows additional scalability at more attractive costs but unless you are faced with specific challenges the natural inclination is to leave well enough alone.

Isn’t [complexity] always the concern? I remember when managers worried about the complexity of the 7.3 database. I may not go as far as to say “unfounded” but it is certainly missing the forest for the trees because the reality is Grid reduces complexity, makes larger environments more manageable, and lowers cost in the long run.

Fess up — how many of you are putting off grid indefinitely because you fear the effort of implementation? Or are you just afraid of change in general?

If your company already has RAC in place, does it serve your purposes just fine? Are you seeing benefits? Do you have any plans to increase the number of nodes? Are plans to take the plunge into grid in the works? Let us know your position.

-Elisa

There’s some interesting discussion going on this week over at Lewis Cunningham’s blog, as well as various other blogs and forums, asking whether open source companies are dabbling in hypocrisy — are they OK with taking business away from the big boys like Oracle, but not OK with other open source vendors treading on their own territory? — and if they’re really just monopolies waiting to happen.

Lewis C points to a discussion over the competition, as it were, between PostgreSQL and EnterpriseDB — specifically, a press release in which EnterpriseDB claimed ability to deliver better performance than PostgreSQL. A post on the PGSQL Advocacy forum denounced this claim as “cow dung.” Lewis finds this a little funny/baffling, or in his words, “hypocritical crap”:

The funny part to me is that this is not a new message. It only becomes a problem when the purity of PostgreSQL is called into question. Say what you want about the evil proprietary vendors (or even that evil OTHER open source database that must not be named! HINT: MySQL. Oh my gosh did I say that out loud?) but don’t diss THE POSTGRESQL!

CNET’s Matt Asay and Roy Russo at LoopFuse are musing about whether the open source business model is inherently monopolistic: “OSS companies focusing on the proprietary competition win out in the end, but if history is a guide, they also manage to squash their own OSS competitors by doing so,” writes Russo. Does “any market ultimately [have] room for only one purveyor of free software”? “So much for peace, love and open source,” says Asay. Asay goes on to say, however, that he thinks this is an oversimplification of the open source model. “There may not be room for Yet Another Open-Source Business Intelligence Vendor (YAOSBIY for short) ;-), but surely, there’s room for plenty more in this space who drive greater performance, superior ease of use, etc.? Open source becomes a facet of how such companies compete — an important one but not the outcome-determinative one.”

Do you think there’s truth to either of these claims? Are open sourcers ultimately as greedy and territorial as their proprietary counterparts? Do they have the right to take the moral high ground? Are there room for multiple open source vendors in the market?

Have a good weekend,
Elisa

I field the questions that come to our Ask the Expert section—deleting spam and nonsense and otherwise undesirable questions before forwarding the potentially answerable ones on to our panel of experts. I don’t have to answer them, and even I get annoyed when I see the same, often vague questions over and over (“How to back up my database?”) or something that obviously came from a homework assignment. (When you get 10 questions in a row from the same email address, all addressing different “problems,” it looks a little suspicious.)

That’s why I’m working on a collection of FAQ resources for our readers, so our experts won’t have to keep answering the same queries over and over again. One of our first new FAQ offerings is a three-part SQL FAQ assembled by our witty resident SQL guru Rudy Limeback. Rudy revisits the most common questions he’s taken over the past six years, from the most basic duh-type questions, to the homework questions, to genuinely complex and interesting ones. Check out all three parts of the FAQ:

• Part one: Novice questions: These are generally very simple and are asked by beginners who are quite unfamiliar with SQL. Common examples include “What is the difference between…” questions, such as “What is the difference between a candidate key and a composite key?” Other common novice questions depend on circumstances and context, such as “Which is faster, a subquery or a join?”
• Part two: Homework questions: Our experts are usually reluctant to answer these, but Rudy will take a homework question if it can teach something interesting like a subtle nuance of SQL to all readers. For example, “All employees under a given manager” is a common but tough problem that Rudy discusses comprehensively.
• Part three covers serious and complex SQL questions that come up frequently. This is the meatiest part of the FAQ, so dig in and enjoy! You’ll discover how to delete duplicate rows, how to find the first (or last) N rows in a table, how to handle pagination and much more.

If you’ve got a burning SQL question that’s not addressed here, send it to Rudy. He thrives on them.

-Elisa

Tim Hall at the ORACLE-BASE blog and Andy C at nbrightside have been writing about search engines (what percentage of their blog traffic comes from search engines, what percentage of that search traffic comes from Yahoo vs. Google, etc.). Search engine minutiae is endlessly fascinating to me, and these blogs prompted me to poke around our own stats to see what’s been bringing people to the Eye on Oracle blog lately.

I compiled this list of some of the amusing and/or unlikely search strings that have recently led folks to our humble blog:

• what do you mean theoretical database
• arrogant oracle database
• sap on sql sucks
• oracle pl/sql sucks
• oracle webcenter sucks (Note to self: Use the word “sucks” more for search engine optimization)
• learn oracle dba in one week
• what would a database administrator do (I can see the shirts now: WWDBAD?)
• database work is for suckers
• recent dumb in oracle
• WHINING AND GRINING (Grining? I get 439 hits in Google for this . . . does that make “grining” a word? But then “oralce” gets over 183,000 . . . there’s even an oralce.com! Talk about capitalizing on misspellings.)
• sheryl, rich does like you (????!)
• how does the eye function in easy languages
• how does anyone ever use oracle when sql server is so much easier to use (Apparently some people are trying to engage Google in an actual conversation)
• does anybody really do enterprise architecture (Nah. I think it’s a myth)
• hate oracle dst patch
• kramer dba seinfeld
• elisa gabbert blog (Aww. I have a fan!)

What kooky phrases are turning up in your referring URLs?

-Elisa