Two quick notes

I want to welcome the first Turkish Oracle ACED on BI and VLDB, Hüsnü Şensoy – http://tinyurl.com/c67g58

Introduction to Oracle database concepts one day free seminar, H.Tonguç Yılmaz – http://tinyurl.com/dy9clu

INFO: Dion Cho from OTN forums has started blogging in English

I saw Dion Cho from OTN forums has started blogging in English: http://dioncho.wordpress.com/ and wanted to share.

Annual my favorites updates

During 2008 there were a lot of new Oracle blogs I tried to follow, nowadays it is so hard to catch up with all the information around us. Within our limited time resource it is very important to choose which blogs is your own favorites.

Until this morning I couldn’t manage to update my favorites, so if you want to take a look here are my favorites as of today.

Andrew Barry’s DBA Queries at shutdownabort.com

I loved the idea behind shutdownabort.com and wanted to share; handy scripts that a DBA may need daily are categorized by subject here, you can find and consume them easily.

Very similar to psoug quick test case idea I strongly believe this kind of a code library is also a basic and important need, after years we all have our own libraries.

So I think this idea can make an important difference for Oracle’s wiki if we all participate?

How to give positive feedback as an Oracle customer?

Any company who value their profit must be after their customers’ feedbacks. So we as Oracle users, how do we give our feedback about things we experience? This experience can be a bug, an improvement need or a new feature request and after this feedback we need to receive a response back of course. Metalink is the place for official support, if you purchase of course, usually buggy/nasty situations are topics here. So can we say OTN forums, Oracle related blogs are the places to give our valuable feedback to Oracle? Since I believe so, I will be doing this with this post :)

Each individual is unique and as a result during our daily Oracle quests in our environments we all face different, interesting experiences. But think about somebody coming and requesting from you this kind of a feedback one day, you can get nervous or excited I guess, after all those fights what to say now? :)

I am a part of a telco organization who owns one of the most prominent data warehouses among all Oracle data warehouse customers, also a highly loaded Billing/CRM Oracle OLTP database. Within last ~10 years there were very interesting experiences we had as a team, some we could speak out loud and share, some we can not of course, some I can not remember now even they felt very scary and unforgettable once upon a time. So I tried to use my blog to produce this kind of a feedback.

WordPress has a very nice feature, the random post option at the top right menu, by clicking it several times and reviewing my own posts for the last two years within some minutes my list was ready to go.

In this list some items can be not so valid, some can be very interesting I know, but what I try to point out here is in order to come out with a list like this you need to document your daily experience, in a light fashion of course, blogging like a dairy can be very helpful for this kind of a need or “what did I do last year?” kind of a question’s answers.

So now I hope here comes your items, come on don’t be shy and comment, sky can be our limit here who cares right :)

Turkish Oracle Community Related Updates

Just to prove I am still alive, I wanted to write a post :)

This May our Turkish Oracle Users group forum will be 10 years old. ~1500 memberships and ~5000 messages until now.

I always tried to support OracleTurk since there is a very limited amount of Turkish resources related to Oracle, also CeTurk is another forum I try to support in Turkish. Recently there was an announcement of a new Turkish forum http://oracleforum.info/ which is founded by the members of the local Oracle University team.

Türkiye has young and very talented software engineers, parallel to this fact as far as I can follow the Turkish Oracle Users community is also growing quietly. I am 32 and I feel like a dinosaur within these guys. So here is a small list that you may want to check which consists of Turkish Oracle Bloggers writing in English who are near 25, yes 25 :)

http://husnusensoy.wordpress.com/
http://bhatipoglu.com/
http://ozgurmacit.wordpress.com/
http://erturkdiriksoy.wordpress.com/
http://kamranagayev.wordpress.com/
http://sertaccamci.blogspot.com/
http://emreknlk.blogspot.com/
http://emrebaransel.blogspot.com/
http://afsungur.blogspot.com/
http://merveolamli.wordpress.com/
http://ora-exp.blogspot.com/
http://zengin.wordpress.com/
http://akdora.wordpress.com/

Yasin, Coşkan and Kubilay more popular Turkish bloggers who are older ones like me, near 30 lets say :)

Oracle had always tons of critiques in my country why they can not touch young poeple compared to IBM and Microsoft, so nowadays we may say things are changing and forums/blogs are the main drivers behind this change I guess.

ps: I am looking for anyone who has been ~10 years of Oracle DBA/Developer, liked to play with Oracle and than chose to continue their career in decision making side, to have their comments on this kind of a migration, are they cool or missing the feeling of being a doer?

Some Thoughts on Blogging and Vendor Management

I was thinking about the alternative cost of blogging and ironically I found myself blogging. :) Here the cost I want to highlight is the time spent of course. Blogging starts like training, it is always harder to write on a topic, then post after post you receive comments and socially this kind of an interaction and the feeling of being followed motivates blogging more, with higher standarts. After some time you find yourself addicted to blogging I guess, whatever you do you search for a reason to blog. At this point if you stop for a second and think the time you give up to blogging instead of being with your family and friends it is really scary in my opinion.

At tonguc.oracleturk.org I have blogged from 30-01-2006 to 25-12-2006: 483 posts, 1 page, contained within 2 categories. And than here at tonguc.wordpress.com I have been blogging since 25-12-2006: 231 posts, 5 pages, 386 total comments, contained within 18 categories and 35 tags. Over 314,000 wordpress hits within two years and important friendships all around the world. So after all this time nowadays I think to limit my blogging addiction, in the future I will be blogging less most probably but I will be still around. :)

First two coming posts will be my seminar notes of Oracle Index Internals by Richard Foote and implementing a near real time telco service datawarehouse with Oracle’s advanced queue option: service layers will be notified based on a ~300 to 500 GB of data streaming from network devices including location updates of ~36 million subscribers. Can AQ handle this workload, if so how, we will see soon. :)

I was also thinking about the global economic crisis and what kind of a vendor management strategy will be best for today’s conditions. Oracle’s already provided options within the database licence provides important cost advantages in my opinion; you nearly do not need any other vendor’s stuff for any kind of your database application need. So you get closer and closer only with one vendor like Oracle, this is a strategic partnership especially if you are doing some business at the ends. So they are always there for your success, your support needs are handled with special care since your success is also their success.

We lost Carl..

This morning I read the tweets of this very bad news..

Carl’s OTN Apex forum activity, blog and Apex examples were always my guides through my Apex adventures..

I still can not believe this, he left comments on my blog two weeks ago..

We all will miss you Carl..

blog : http://carlback.blogspot.com/
apex examples : http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=11933:5

aejes @oracletechnet a big big loss. I had the pleasure of counting Carl as a friend. Can’t believe it. My thoughts are with his family about 1 hour ago from twitterrific in reply to oracletechnet

fuadar @eddieawad yes @carlback will definitely be missed about 5 hours ago from TwitterFox in reply to eddieawad

oracletechnet More info about @carlback; he will be missed. http://snurl.com/4rd4a [www_lasvegassun_com] about 7 hours ago from web

eddieawad Linda, a friend of @carlback sent out this FB msg: he [Carl] died early sunday morning around 3am in a bad car accident. about 7 hours ago from web

eddieawad What! @carlback passed away! RIP. http://bit.ly/33y0Dv about 7 hours ago from web

fuadar wow RIP @carlback about 8 hours ago from TwitterFox

oracletechnet @carlback Carl Backstrom, RIP. Good guy, a terrible loss. about 9 hours ago from web in reply to carlback

dannorris Re @carlback: http://friendfeed.com/las about 9 hours ago from twhirl

dannorris @fuadar @topperge Message said it was early Sunday morning, the 26th. about 10 hours ago from twhirl in reply to fuadar

fuadar @dannorris i see the last tweet form @carlback is oct 24th about 10 hours ago from TwitterFox in reply to dannorris

dannorris I had a message from someone I don’t know that @carlback died in a car accident over the weekend. Corroboration? RIP @carlback if true. about 10 hours ago from twhirl

Two quick notes to share

My colleague Hüsnü Şensoy is much more active recently and he will be presenting at OOW 2008; Growing a Data Warehouse to 50 Terabytes and Beyond” in Oracle Open World

This thread on OTN forums was interesting to read this morning, once I also wrote on these wars but this time after reading this thread it made me think about my part on this so called *rant war*.

Now one and a half year passed and this blog is running to a quarter million views

Recently I didn’t blog much, still ~650 views a day I monitor from wordpress dashboard. It is like yesterday, I decided to move to this wordpress domain at December 2006 from tonguc.oracleturk.org because of some administrative reasons. My first post was a short one :)
http://tonguc.wordpress.com/2006/12/26/detecting-unrecoverable-operations/

Being a blogger has alternative costs, life passes by quickly and you choose to sit and write on something you experienced. But no pain no gain, being a blogger is an important opportunity to study topics further. It is always harder to write on something. Also as you are a blogger you may build up friendships with other bloggers, this is another good opportunity to share opinions closer. I always think blogging is different than writing an article, it is much more like a fast food, a blog post is nice for me if it can be consumed fast and easily. :)

There are a lot of very experienced people around me who thinks they can not blog because they are very busy, which makes me laugh because as a result I become very non-busy. :) For me this is just another choice of course with its alternative costs. Also some of mt friends think that if they can not make a difference why to start blogging since there are a lot of bloggers already. But I strongly believe that anyone’s experience on any topic can be unique and valuable, they can be simple and nice since we are not doing rocket science anyway. :)

I love to read and learn from forums and blogs as a result I believe I benefited more than I shared in my opinion. So I hope these kind of web 2.0 information sharing opportunities never stop growing.

As far as I can see XE, APEX and SQL Tracing was the most attractive topics to my readers, naturally these three areas were also personally mine most liked blogging areas. I may say in the future I do not think I will be blogging as much as I did especially like at 2007, but whenever I experience something I think is valuable to share, I promise I will do my best to blog about it.

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