OTN TechBlog

We just published a podcast interview with Zach Brown, the Oracle Linux Kernel Team member working on RDS and AIO. The interview previously podcasted interview with his colleague Chris Mason was a huge hit - it was the second most popular show we've ever done in fact.

As an aside, I had the rare opportunity to lunch with Oracle co-founder Ed Oates and Ken Jacobs yesterday. To hear those two guys trading war stories about Oracle's very early days was a great treat - neither one of them ever imagined that the company would reach its current size and scope. "What do all these people do?", asked Ed rhetorically....

Given the rising interest in Oracle+Ruby/RoR, Oracle+Python, etc., OTN has launched a new Scripting Language Technology Center. This is your one-stop shop for all content pertaining to that subject on OTN.

As usual we are looking for good how-to content from these communities - if you're interested, drop me a line

As announced some time ago, official Oracle Documentation is being indexed by Google as we speak.

This will be a great help to Oracle newbies who otherwise would not have been exposed to the doc unless they thought to become OTN members.

"It's a good thing," as Martha would say.

The Web Monkeys among you have surely heard of Yahoo Pipes by now, Yahoo's new hosted, declarative "programming" environment for creating interesting Web 2.0 mashups (eg, Google Base + Yahoo Search + del.icio.us etc).

If you are an OTN Semantic Web user however you can already do a variation of that operation, for all Oracle content syndicated via RSS. Basically, you can create topic-specific mashups from various Oracle RSS feeds.

For example, want to create a "live" bookmark in FF that contains all Oracle syndicated info re: Oracle Fusion Middleware + Identity Management + Java? Build that query from the OTN SemWeb homepage, and then you can cull the results via RSS (look for the orange RSS button in the left nav).

Or, you could even pipe that RSS URL to Pipes, add some third-party Oracle content, and customize your experience even further.

We are in the process of implementing "RSS everywhere" on OTN, in fact, so the possibilities will open up even further. More to come.

This post is simply a shout-out to blogs.oracle.com blogger Alejandro Vargas, who is posting a treasure trove of information about best practices for RAC deployment. Alejandro is a support analyst in the Oracle Israel support org, so he know whereof he speaks.

Now, here's something that Oracle SES does that even Google can't: Make your search results available via RSS. This functionality is now present at search.oracle.com:



Thus, if you are interested in new content published on OTN associated with any given keyword, you can get those results delivered directly to your newsreader.

This has profound implications for content publishing on OTN. Used in conjunction with an XSLT, we'll be able to deliver search results dynamically in html, obviating the need for hard-coded pages (in some cases).

March 11 approaches - if you haven't determined whether your systems will be affected by the DST changes this year, this guide we just posted on OTN will step you through that process.

The amount of FUD out there re: Oracle Unbreakable Linux is truly remarkable - as one unknown wit once remarked, "You are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts."

Wim Coekaerts, Oracle's VP of Linux Engineering, has much to say on this subject in this new blog post.

Key quote: "It is the same code people, it is the same code."