Archive for December 14th, 2005
That was the year that was.
I’m off to sunny Florida tomorrow, followed by freezing NJ a week later, so I thought now would be a good time to look back at 2005. There are probably as many ways to do this as there are sunday newspaper supplements, but I’ve chosen to pick my choice of the top posts from various Oracle blogs (plus a couple of associated sites).
I’ll start, as my teachers taught me, at the beginning.
Lisa Dobson who runs the newbie dba blog for, well people at the start of their dba career, posted a couple of articles (I’ve picked the first) on What do I need to know?
Now the most common response to this you’ll receive in an online forum is the rather rude RTFM. Tom Kyte had a view on this response back in July as often with Tom’s blog the discussion it generated was nearly as good as the original post.
Also with beginnings and comments, we see Mogens Norgaard starting out on the blog thing and immediately using comments to post new content:)
One of the nice things about blogs is that they allow the personality of the author through, sometimes though personality can become ego. This trend was nicely pointed up by Doug Burns here.
The other trend that I see occurring is blog authors using their blogs to explain something they know well to a wider audience. I hope this continues. So my next choice is not a post, but a series of posts by David Aldridge in which he talks about optimisation and new uses for materialized views. The series starts here.
On the other hand this gem spotted by both Oracle-wtf and Fabian Pascal doesn’t explain anything at all much. Least of all joins.
I have just taken delivery of Jonathan Lewis’ new book – a review will have to wait until the new year. One thing however that immediately stands out is the meticulous attention to detail. It is this same attention to detail, coupled with clear and direct explanation that characterised Jonathan’s series of articles named after Lewis Carroll’s mysterious beast the Snark.
Finally and by way of Pete Finnigan and possibly a prelude to one of the Hot Topics for Oracle in 2006 is my namesake David Litchfield’s critique of Oracle Corporation’s approach to security.