OTN TechBlog

Enterprise Irregular Vinnie Mirchandani has kind words for Oracle ACEs today, which is really a great thing to see. They deserve all the public recognition they can get.

I did remind Vinnie that "appreciation dinners" are just the highest tip of the iceberg;  we're in constant touch with them across the year -- not only to keep them informed, but also to partner with them in their various activities where it makes sense.

The best part?I get to personally meet folks like Ron Batra, Floyd Teter, Doug Burns, etc., which in any other case would be rather unlikely.

Follow the recent mini-controversy spawned by Scoble in his post; "Why Enterprise Software isn't Sexy."

Enterprise Irregulars like Vinnie Mirchandani, Anshu Sharma, and Michael Krigsman are all over Scoble like white on rice for his explanation about why enterprise software is a relatively rare topic for bloggers (compared to consumer tech) - Scoble's main reason being: there's nothing sexy about software you are forced to use every day by some IT executive.

To me though (having a publishing background), the issue is purely one of "eyeball economics." Scoble asks "How many people in the world actually buy business software?", but the question should be: "How many people in the world actually use business software?"

There just aren't that many people on the "consume" side exposed to, and interested in, enterprise software. This fact is evidenced by the almost total collapse of the trade publication sector that, until 2001 or so, served that market. These days, the only places to get such info are from the weeklies (InfoWorld et al), and it's on a pretty high level.

This fact makes "sexiness" or "nonsexiness" beside the point. If the percentage of people who have that user experience is so small that there aren't enough eyeballs to go around, then the publishing/micro-publishing that serves such a market will be equally small.

Oracle and SAP can make their apps as sexy as iTunes, but when the chips are down, the media/blogosphere response will likely be the same.

Oracle's SOA team (which includes the always enjoyable Clemens Utschig-Utschig) has just released a major piece of documentation that will be well-appreciated by architects: the Oracle SOA Suite 10.1.3x Best Practices Guide.

This 272-page guide covers all Oracle SOA Suite components, including BPEL Process Manager, Oracle BAM, and Oracle ESB. In large portions it takes an FAQ approach, covering common questions that have arisen across the community (including forums.oracle.com).

I'm interested to hear what SOA-minded Oracle ACEs like Jason Jones, Lonneke Dikmans, Lucas Jellema, and Nathalie Roman think about this.

As many of you may know, OTN runs a full-fledged publishing operation: We recruit authors, acquire manuscripts for a fee, review them on a technical value level, and then edit/produce them for publication in HTML.

This morning, I read about a new Google offering called knol, now in Beta (what else?), that will allow authors to self-publish into a massive knowledge base. In essence, Google will offer a metadata-rich template that support comments, Q&A, wiki-style edits etc.; embedded ads will be an option. Obviously this knowledge base will be exposed to the world via Google search. Think of it like a blog that consists of a single piece of content.

This effort is a reflection of the complete and total breakdown of the traditional editorial model, in which the "editor" determines what you should read and the publisher determines how to promote it. Instead, the author is full control; dis-intermediation is complete.

Is our publishing operation about to join the dinosaurs in the "ashbin of history"? I'm starting to think that OTN needs to take a completely different form: as an aggregator, not a platform. The Googleverse is the only platform now.

Update: Several commenters have declared knol a Wikipedia competitor, but I don't know if that's true. Wikipedia is all about collaborative authoring, whereas knol appears to be all about personal authoring (and it's not clear that collaborative editing is even supported). Nevertheless, "innocent bystanders" are never immune to accidental injury.

Once again, Eddie Awad comes through with a great Facebook app for the community: the Oracle Blogs app.

Even easier to track the Oracle blogosphere!

As we approach the end of the calendar year, it's time for me to get my podcast lineup in place for the next quarter or so.

As you may know, OTN TechCasts now focus exclusively on the cutting edge of application development (including open source), which gives us a lot of latitude for interesting guests from within as well as outside of Oracle. (It's worth mentioning that this series is by far the most popular one produced by Oracle, with well over 4,000 subscribers - and more than half a million downloads.)

What guests would you want to hear from, and on what topics? Sound off.

What were OTN visitors reading in 2007? All is revealed:

1. "Installing Oracle Database 10g Release 2 on Linux x86", by John Smiley (2005)
Interesting that an unofficial install guide (from a senior engineer at a major, Seattle-based online retailer not to be named) would turn out to be so popular, for so long - especially since it covers only RHEL4 and SLES9. BTW, I have John's update for 11g in my hands right now (for publication in the early new year; will cover OEL5 only).

2. "Oracle Database 10g: The Top 20 Features for DBAs", by Arup Nanda (2003)
Another crowd favorite, for obvious reasons. Arup's 11g version is under way.

3. "Guide to Linux File Command Mastery", by Sheryl Calish (2004)
Seems many people are looking to OTN for general education about Linux admin, which I consider an accomplishment.

4. "Build a .NET Application on the Oracle Database", by John Cook (2004)
The flip side of that above-mentioned coin. Where better to learn how to connect to Oracle from a .NET app than OTN?

5. "Installing PHP and the Oracle 10g Instant Client for Linux and Windows", by Chris Jones (2005)
Nice to see that you have to reach #5 on the list before hitting an article authored by an Oracle employee. In fact, it's the only one on this list.

6. "Oracle Database 11g: The Top New Features for DBAs and Developers", by Arup Nanda (in progress)
As mentioned above. This will become the most popular content in 2008, for sure.

7. "Build Your Own Oracle RAC 10g Rel 2 Cluster on Oracle Enterprise Linux and iSCSI", by Jeffrey Hunter (2007)
One in a long line of guides from Jeff, which began with Oracle9i RAC on RHEL3 and FireWire. This one is a classic.

8. "SOA Best Practices: The BPEL Cookbook", by various authors (2005)
This series should be (and apparently is in many cases) the first stop for developers or architects who are diving into standards-based app-to-app integration.

9. "An Introduction to Java Map Collection Classes", by Jack Shirazi (2004)
A big surprise. This manuscript was on my desk when I started working at Oracle in 2003, and it's still a huge draw - Jack has a great rep in Java performance tuning circles.

10. "Writing Better SQL Using Regular Expressions", by Alice Rischert (2003)
One of the first pieces of content to publish about Oracle Database 10g.

Telling that this list crosses database admin, PHP & .NET development, SOA, Linux admin, and Java performance management areas.

For the "complete" picture, stay tuned for the availability of an ISO download of the "OTN's Greatest Hists of 2007" CD.

If you were at Oracle OpenWorld you may have heard tell of Thomas Kurian's professed "Christmas present for developers," which he and other development VPs referred to obliquely. Literally minutes before I took leave for holiday last week, this present was delivered in the form of new Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Technology Previews, including:

- Oracle JDeveloper 11g Tech Preview 3, the first release to include design time support for Oracle WebCenter as well as SOA - in fact, JDeveloper and SOA Suite have now been integrated, thereby permitting test runs of SOA apps (by virtue of an included OC4J install) directly from the design-time
environment. (See Release Notes.)

- OC4J 11g Tech Preview, which includes all the
containers, APIs, and services mandated by the Java EE 5.0 spec and has enhanced support for the Spring Framework. (See Release Notes.)

-  Oracle TopLink 11g Tech Preview 3, now fully compliant with the JPA spec (which is in turn part of the Java EE 5 EJB 3.0 spec) (see Release Notes).

Download away - this is really good news as we've all been on pins and needles for this stuff.

As an end-of-year tidbit, let me also include a piece of news that I nearly missed last week:

Leading Research Firm Recognizes Oracle as Leader in Worldwide Embedded Database Management System Vendor Share (download report excerpt here)

Oracle, the king of the relational database, now the embedded database leader as well? In my view this is something of a sea change signaled by the SleepyCat and TimesTen acquisitions, I'm not 100% sure this market was taken extremely seriously by Oracle previously (Oracle Lite notwithstanding). IBM, of course, fired the first shot in this skirmish with its acquisition of Cloudscape some years ago (which has since disappeared from the map; witness IBM's solidDB acquisition of some weeks ago. IBM also now owns Bruce Scott's PointBase by virtue of its acquisition of DataMirror.)

As an insider I can confirm that Berkeley DB is ubiquitous to an ungodly degree; it can be found in places that would surprise many people. Apparently Oracle made the right choice.

I spoke with Oracle's embedded development VP Mike Olson via podcast recently; it's a good source of further info in this area. My podcast with BDB architect Margo Seltzer is a good listen too; between those two old UC Berkeley Comp Sci department hands, I learned a lot.