OTN TechBlog

Apparently there is quite an "OTN nation" in the Faroe Islands, between
Iceland and Norway.

Recently Oracle ACE Grant Ronald from the Forms team absconded there to lead a hands-on SOA/Java/Forms workshop, and he is confident that the entire developer community (numbering 33 Faroese) was in attendance:

The Oracle AppsLab team - a group of individuals (Paul Pedrazzi et al) within the Oracle Apps organization who are working hard to encourage community-building - has just externalized their new blog.

This is definitely worth an RSS subscription. Paul & Co. are going to cover a litany of enterprise 2.0-related topics, not just Oracle Apps stuff.

Scoble comments that Oracle Blogs are on his regular reading list (although we have yet to become one of his "favorites"; working on that).

My recent post about Oracle being a neglected stepchild in the mainstream blogging community caused something of a ruckus, which of course was partly my intention. I'm confident that I have motivated Oracle bloggers to be more aware of the wider blogosphere, and perhaps some in the latter to be more aware of the former. But regardless of this issue of Web 2.0 "political correctness", there is no question that as a source of community-generated technical information and best practices - that is, as an actionable resource (not just digital "fishwrap" for blogger busy-bodies) - Oracle Blogs have few equals. And this fact should be recognized at face value.

I'm also confident that you will see more signs of Oracle's broader participation in the rather parochial yet very influential Web 2.0 community in the next year. I'll be happy to report them as they appear.

As you've probably heard, Oracle is announcing Oracle Database 11g on July 11 in New York City, with RTM to occur shortly thereafter.

Just a quick post here to let you know that Oracle ACE Arup Nanda of Starwood Hotels, the author of the stupendously popular Oracle Database 10g: Top Features for DBAs series on OTN, will author "Oracle Database 11g: Top Features for DBAs and Developers" as well. The new series will not only include the brief, actionable, get-me-off-the-ground-with-this-new-feature installments you know and love, but will also be accompanied by screencasts that demonstrate exactly how these features work - including Database Replay, SQL Access Advisor, Intelligent Schema Design, the many partitioning improvements, and on and on.

Look for it! We'll have an RSS feed for it as well.

The Oracle DBA Toolbar is finally available in Mozilla Firefox flavor. Sorry for the long wait.

Man, Mike Hichwa's team at Oracle is spinning out some incredible
database tools. These are the guys and gals responsible for two of the
most innovative things to come out of here in a long time, Application
Express and SQL Developer. I view this group as a "skunk works" that
has some pretty nice flexibility in terms of its role within the Server
Technologies division here at Oracle, and the results show it.



It's amazing to me that prior to 10g, Oracle's database tools strategy was almost non-existent. Now, it leads the industry.

SQL Developer 1.2, now production, now incorporates a completely re-developed Migration Workbench. As Donal Daly points out,
this release makes Oracle the first vendor to release a migration tool
integrated directly into an IDE. (See a bunch of online demos here.) So, migrating to Oracle from Access, MySQL, or SQL Server is now just so much easier than it was previously.

Oracle Fusion Middleware evangelist Omar Tazi, who focuses on the OSS area, recently gave a presentation to an Oracle users group that is well summarized by BMC Software blogger William Hurley here.

This is one of the rare occasions where most of Oracle's OSS "non-strategy" is laid out, and rather accurately. (By "non-strategy" I mean: a strategy not to have a strategy. In a nod to common-sense practicality over dogma, Oracle encourages customers to use OSS in their stack where and when it makes sense for them.)

As always, oss.oracle.com is the place to go to learn more about Oracle's own F/OSS projects. All Oracle Linux projects (OCFS2, e.g.) are hosted there.

As promised, we have delivered a new salvo of Oracle + Ruby on Rails how-to's on the OTN Web site, at the Scripting Languages Technology Center:

• Easy Integration: From XML to the Datastore Without the Mess
  
• Tagging with Oracle and Ruby on Rails
  
• Guide to Ruby on Rails Migrations
  
• 
  Connecting to Oracle from Ruby on Rails
  

The baby raptors perched on the edge of an Oracle HQ tower have flown the coop!

We've re-organized the blogs.oracle.com homepage by topic area. You like?

It was just becoming too difficult to wade through all the item-by-item descriptions (most of which were repetitive). You'll also note an expanded aggregator.

IMO it's an improvement, but if I get enough screaming and yelling for a rollback, that's fine too.

Of course, OTN Semantic Web Beta is still the best way to navigate the blogosphere, even if it does aggregate only a subset of these blogs.

The "three amigos" of Oracle AppsLab - Paul Pedrazzi, Jake Kuramoto,  Rich Manalang - have done  Oracle a great service with their internally deployed   "Oracle Idea Factory". (AppsLab is already required reading BTW, and not just for Oracle wonks. Thought leadership is in high evidence there.)

With this service, product managers across the org are suggesting new Oracle Apps features and functionality, rating other suggestions, and offering comments as well, with the whole enchilada being marked up for tagging. (Clarification since initial post: Idea Factory is specifically designed to gather ideas for building Web 2.0-like features into Fusion Applications.)

We of course have already seen similar customer-facing services from Dell and Salesforce.com, but in some ways, this app has even more credibility, because the role of a product manager is to aggregate customer requirements over a wide sample. (This is not to say that a single customer's input is not valuable; only that the Oracle approach may be a more efficient approach for the purpose of driving internal development.)

Looking forward to more results from the AppsLab skunkworks. In fact, I'm going to look into a podcast recording with these guys.