Larry Ellison, everybody’s favorite yacht-racing former-playboy billionaire, is beloved by journalists looking for a memorable quip . . . or a blog post. Here are a few amusing ones I’ve come across over the years:

On business:

“A corporation’s primary goal is to make money. Government’s primary role is to take a big chunk of that money and give it to others.”

“When you’re the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you’re basically saying, “I’m right, and everyone else is wrong.” That’s a very unpleasant position to be in. It’s at once exhilarating and at the same time an invitation to be attacked.”

“Bill Gates wants people to think he’s Edison, when he’s really Rockefeller. Referring to Gates as the smartest man in America isn’t right… wealth isn’t the same thing as intelligence.”

“You know, in Rome if they did not like somebody, they threw them to the lions in the coliseum. Today we have the media.”

On being filthy rich:

“When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich. I mean, rich does not even describe this. This is surreal.”

“I think after a certain amount of time I’m going to give almost everything I have to charity. Because what else can you do with it? You can’t spend it, even if you try. I’ve been trying.”

“Being first is more important to me. I have so much more money. Whatever money is, it’s just a method of keeping score now. I mean, I certainly don’t need more money.”

On parenting:

“My son first wanted to go to Stanford, which I thought was O.K. The weather is pretty good, and it’s a fairly short drive to the beach. But it wouldn’t be as good as let’s say, Pepperdine, which is in Malibu. And he said, ‘Dad, what about the education?’ I said, ‘Clearly, I failed as a parent.’”

On giving hope to slackers and hackers:

“I left school without a degree, came to California. I never took a computer science class in my life. I got a job working as a programmer; I was largely self-taught. I just picked up a book and started programming.”

Enjoy, Tim

You’ve read about the best movies of 2007 (which you haven’t seen) and the most embarrassing celebrity scandals of 2007 (which you don’t care about). How about something a tad more relevant?

Here is our look back at your favorites of the year that was 2007:

1. Is Oracle technology too darn expensive? - This year, many IT professionals said they would consider an alternative to Oracle because of the high cost of running Oracle database or business applications.
2. Oracle SQL Developer gets an update - Last January, Oracle unveiled a new version of its free SQL Developer tool and also the SQL Developer Exchange site.
3. Author Mike Ault sizes up the new Oracle Database 11g - This exclusive podcast interview features Mike Ault, a popular speaker at all the major Oracle conferences, discussing Oracle Database 11g’s new SQL replay and memory management capabilities and much more.
4. Oracle shows off Database 11g - Last July, after a nine-month beta test, Oracle unveiled its Database 11g, the long-awaited overhaul of its flagship database management system.
5. Oracle SQL Developer vs. Toad: Users speak out, part two Oracle developers had differing opinions on the best PL/SQL editing and debugging tools.

And here on the blog, the posts that got you the most riled up were as follows:

1. “Database administration is for suckers”?
2. Is Oracle supportive?
3. Does anybody really like SQL?
4. Oracle ACE program “almost completely worthless”
5. Thirty years of Oracle innovation — but is it really a RDBMS?

But wait, there’s more! We also list the most popular tips, expert responses and learning guides of the year. For some interesting data management predictions for 2008, check out SearchDataManagement.com’s compilations.

From all of us here at SearchOracle.com and TechTarget, we wish you a happy and prosperous 2008!

–Tim

Veteran Oracle DBA Richard Foote recently posted an interesting article/diatribe about the myth of rebuilding Oracle indexes. He states:

There are still many people who think indexes should be rebuilt regularly if they experience lots of DML, that indexes should be rebuilt if they’re have a height greater than some level. . . . [But] most indexes never need to be rebuilt. Never, ever.

It’s an entertaining read, with some lively discussion from readers. On a related note, we also have posted several myth-busting articles you might be interested in. For example,

1. Tom Kyte’s frequently asked questions and myths about indexes, including

• Myth: Space is never reused in an index
• Myth: Most discriminating elements should be first

2. Mike Ault’s Oracle myths debunked

• Myth: Indexes and tables do not need to be separated
• Myth: Multiple blocksizes don’t improve performance

Sure, Mike and Tom are no Adam and Jamie (they’ve caused no explosions that I know of), but newbies need to be aware of some of the controversies, half-truths and outright errors percolating in the Oracle community. Do you know of any myths that you’d like to see busted? Let us know!

Have a good week, Tim

SOA guru Steve Jones recently wrote an amusing riposte to a blogger who warned budding developers not to go into corporate IT because it was “soul suckingly bad.”

The original post, from coder Joel Spolsky, argued that corporate IT development is not a fulfilling career because:

1. You never get to do things the right way. You always have to do things the expedient way. . . . You’re going into Visual Studio, you’re going to click on the wizard, you’re going to drag the little Grid control onto the page, you’re going to hook it up to the database, and presto, you’re done. It’s good enough. Get out of there and onto the next thing.

2. As soon as your program gets good enough, you have to stop working on it. Once the core functionality is there, the main problem is solved, there is absolutely no return-on-investment, no business reason to make the software any better. So all of these in house programs look like a dog’s breakfast: because it’s just not worth a penny to make them look nice. Forget any pride in workmanship or craftsmanship . . . You’re going to churn out embarrassing junk, and then, you’re going to rush off to patch up last year’s embarrassing junk.

3. [Unlike in corporate IT], when you’re a programmer at a software company, the work you’re doing is directly related to the way the company makes money. That means, for one thing, that management cares about you.

Steve responded by saying that Joel must have had a bad experience at a crappy company. “The real reason to me that corporate IT is a great place to work,” he says, is that “if you are good and have good communication skills, you can actually see what you do makes a difference. . . it’s corporate IT where the real achievement is. Software vendors provide the bricks and mortar, they quarry the stone and provide you with the rough hewn pieces for you to carve and give purpose to.”

Plus, he points out, in a corporate setting, there’s better “societal balance — by which I mean women.”

In-house developers might be an endangered species anyway. A Ventana study last year found that many companies prefer to buy, for example, off-the-shelf business intelligence applications rather than build them.

What do you Oracle developers think?

Cheers, Tim

Don Burleson posted an interesting article today on Oracle virtualization and makes the point that it is leading us into the “second age of mainframe computing.”

He writes,

It’s back to the future for the Oracle database world. The inefficient one server/one database approach of 1990s client-server technology is long gone and Oracle shops are now re-consolidating their data resources, moving back to the mainframe-like centralization of the 1980s. . . .

Moreoever, he says that this trend is bad for the DBA job market:

Server consolidation is bad for the DBA job market because one of the main reasons for consolidating hardware resources is the savings from reducing DBA staff. A typical shop can save a million dollars a year by removing a dozen DBAs.

Add virtualization to the list of DBA complaints. . .

-Tim

Is Oracle cool again?

That’s the question that Oracle Apps insider David Haimes asks in a personal account of his ten years at the company. He brings up an interesting point that I’ve been pondering as well:

“Oracle is gobbling up competitors and that is all anybody talks about when you mention you work for Oracle; nothing about our products or new technologies, it’s just who we bought or who we will buy next. . . . [but] this year at Open World people were talking about cool things we are doing again, some of the highlights are Oracle Mix, Oracle Wiki, the No Slide Zone, The Unconference. It feels like we’re trying new things and pushing the boundaries taking some risks.”

Do you agree that Oracle is becoming an “innovative” company again? Can Oracle compare to a company with a risk-taking, cutting-edge reputation such as Google? One look at the labs.google.com page shows a lot of new ideas, albeit most are consumer-level widgets and not mission critical business applications (so far!).

If so, what do you think is the most innovative product/feature Oracle has launched in the last few years? It’s probably not VM, which is just “yet another Xen” product. And Oracle was quite late jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon.

Let me know what you think!

Have a good week,
Tim

Of all the announcements and marketing-speak at OpenWorld recently, the release of Oracle VM seems to be generating some real buzz. But is the technology worthy of all the attention?

Oracle describes VM like this:

Consisting of open source server software and an integrated Web browser-based management console, Oracle VM provides an easy-to-use, rich, graphical interface for creating and managing virtual server pools, running on x86 and x86-64-based systems, across an enterprise.

Users can create and manage Virtual Machines (VMs) that exist on the same physical server but behave like independent physical servers. Each virtual machine created with Oracle VM has its own virtual CPUs, network interfaces, storage and operating system. With Oracle VM, users have an easy-to-use browser-based tool for creating, cloning, sharing, configuring, booting and migrating VMs.

Here’s a sampling of what bloggers think of the new product:

• Mark Rittman: VM “certainly looks very interesting, although the need to install it on a separate, no-OS server and manage it from another will probably stop most of us downloading it tomorrow and giving it a spin on our laptops.”
  
• Tom Kyte: “So, what was the biggest surprise news so far? Oracle VM. I’m a huge fan of virtualization — have been for a long time. This is going to be cool.”
• Tim Hall concurs: “It sounds cool.”

Coolness aside, there is some dissent, of course. Case in point:

• Christian Mohn: “Finally Oracle is recognizing that their customers want and deploy virtualization solutions, but bringing “Yet Another Xen” (YAX) solution to the market seems to me to be a bit strange. How many do we have now? 5? 6? In addition, refusing to offer support for other virtualization products like VMware ESX server seems like a bad move.”
• Tarry Singh: “People should not forget this: Oracle doesn’t care about “generic” virtualization. They are only concerned about their own Oracle RAC and Grid project. This gives Oracle a platform to build its grid upon.”
• Chuck Hollis: “[After the announcement], I went from being curious, to being amused, to being downright disappointed. . . . Broadly speaking, I think many parts of the IT industry has figured out what they’re going to do with virtualization. They realize it’s a big deal that means a lot to their customers, and changes all manner of things going forward. Unfortunately, I don’t think Oracle is one of them. Yet.”

What’s your take on Oracle’s virtualization initiatives? Is it just “warmed-over Xen” or the right product at the right time? What about server virtualization in general? Do you agree with Chuck Hollis, who writes: “Most everyone realizes that virtualization of IT is one of those once-in-a-career, gee-this-changes-everything types of technologies”? I’d be very interested in your thoughts.

Have a good week, Tim

The dust has settled and the blogosphere is taking stock of the OpenWorld show in San Francisco last week. Opinions run the gamut, from:

Pure magic: DBA Chen Shapira writes, “I spend most of my days in a mundane DBA world . . . And then, for one magical week, Oracle becomes exciting again. You meet people who are excited about what they do with Oracle. . . . In the Oracle Magic Kingdom, everything works. All the new features have no bugs, all patches install easily according to metalink instructions, Oracle support listens to your problems and has the right answers, you have sufficient maintenance windows to perform all your tasks, and performance issues are interesting and yet can be resolved within 45 minutes. Magic.”

to…

A firehose: Blogger Ontario Emporer writes, “Oracle doesn’t provide a clear agenda for anybody, which is why I refer to Oracle OpenWorld as a firehose. Even with my limited technological background and my laser interest in a particular portion of Oracle’s product line, I had to make some difficult session attend/non-attend decisions, especially in the first days of the conference. As a result, I missed the entire Unconference; there was too much Conference stuff going on. Add to this all of the private meetings, and it’s impossible to have a clear agenda.”

If you missed the information overload, don’t fret: Oracle’s OpenWorld page has many webcasts to imbibe. (And there were even Stevie Nicks fans there filming her performance, if you’re interested̷

So, what did you think about the show (the actual conference, that is)? Is it time for Oracle to split this monstrosity up into smaller, more topic-specific events? Or is the deluge of geeks and PowerPoints just what makes it great? Let’s hear your thoughts!

Cheers, Tim

Whew!

Mark, Barney and I are wrapping up a long, busy week in San Francisco at OpenWorld. We met a lot of you, saw a lot of PowerPoint, and heard a lot of executive-speak. It was a fun, informative week — although the word “zoo” springs immediately to mind!

We’ve posted four articles so far, including:

• Ellison names first Oracle Fusion Applications - Larry Ellison dropped the names of the first Oracle Fusion Applications at Oracle OpenWorld today.
• Oracle adds Enterprise 2.0 to Fusion Middleware 11g - Rebuffed by BEA, Oracle is forging ahead with its Fusion Middleware product and adding new Enterprise 2.0 features.
• Oracle Database 11g and information management - Oracle Database 11g’s new features were designed to combat the latest and most prevalent information management problems, according to one Oracle executive speaking at OpenWorld.
• Application integration takes center stage at OpenWorld - Oracle’s plan to simplify the application integration process could cause a stir among its systems integrator partners, one expert says.

And there’s more to come, including a video interview with Oracle BI guru and blogger extraordinaire Mark Rittman. But now, time for some sleep!

Tim

We’ve posted a few new articles from here in SF at OpenWorld:

Oracle Database 11g and information management - Oracle Database 11g’s new features were designed to combat the latest and most prevalent information management problems, according to one Oracle executive speaking at OpenWorld.

Application integration takes center stage at OpenWorld - Oracle’s plan to simplify the application integration process could cause a stir among its systems integrator partners, one expert says.

More to come…

–Tim