OTN TechBlog

Thanks to Oracle ACE Director Matt Topper for his pioneering ora-click site, where you can submit Oracle-related stories for Digg-like treatment. Recently Oracle ACE Director Eddie Awad and Matt worked together to integrate Eddie's OraNA news aggregator feed with ora-click such that many (if not most) posts across the Oracle blogosphere automatically become ora-click fodder. I love this!



Here at Oracle we explored a similar project about a year ago, which would have used some new and interesting standards-based technology for a very similar purpose. Unfortunately we ran into resource-related challenges that killed the project.

Really glad to see that the community has picked up this idea instead, which is right and proper anyway.

Hilarious "Oracle Database Nose-job" video courtesy of Oracle ACE Director Mogens Norgaard, of OakTable fame. (Thanks to Kevin Closson for referring!)

Just heard tell of a free "Software as a Service" seminar (really an "Industry Summit" in Oracle marketing parlance) at Oracle HQ's conference center on Jan. 18.

The keynoter is ZDnet blogger Phil Wainewright, an authority on SaaS use cases and success factors, with panelists including the prescient Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

The focus is not exclusively business-related though; there will be apps- and tech platform-related breakouts covering issues pertaining to IT deployment.

If you're in the valley that day, you should consider checking it out. I'll stop by myself.

Thanks, AppsLab Jake, for the game of blog-tag! (This is now my second game of blog-tag; my first was courtesy of Jeff Pulver but as Jake points out, this is the first version intended for the Oracle blogosphere. Great idea.)

So, eight things you don't know about me (apologies to those who already know them or who read the previous tag post):

1. I am a law school dropout (U. of San Diego). Maybe it was the culture shock of moving directly from Berkeley to a Catholic school in San Diego, maybe not. Either way, it was the best thing I ever did.

2. My godfather was the late Sir Peter Medawar, a Nobel Prize winner in medicine. I don't know why, exactly.

3. My father, born in Budapest, was an anti-Nazi partisan in Yugoslavia during WWII, and later served as a translator at the Nuremberg Trials. He wrote a book (among others) called "The Art of Seduction."

4. I'm a Clash City Rocker. "The Only Band That Matters."

5. I'm a cat person. My cat died last year and I wept uncontrollably for a week.

6. My high school job was flippin' burgers and rollin' "tacoburritos" at Tomasito's in Laguna Beach, Calif. (now a Starbucks, what else?)

7. My mom used to own a lavender farm. (Really.)

8. I have a recurring dream in which although at my present age, I am back in high school or college and have learned that I have missed several lectures and exams in a course in which I didn't know I was enrolled. This has something to do with the blogosphere firehose, I think.

As for my round of blog-tagging, I'm not quite as ambitious as Jake; I'm going to blog-tag a single person: Andrew Clarke, you're it.

I want to add some gloss to Jake Kuramoto's entry about the upcoming Oracle Marketing 2.0 Leader Summit, of which I am one of the organizers (along with Marius Ciortea, Paul Salinger, and Tim Bonnemann).

This internal summit is an important one for several reasons. For one, it will be attended by Oracle influencers from across the globe, some of whom are corporate officers. And for some of those people (particularly those from abroad), this summit will be their first exposure to enterprise 2.0 concepts - in several ways, which I will explain below.

Second, this summit has an explicit results-oriented nature. Our intention is not to get a lot of people in a room and then participate in abstract thought experiments. Rather, the outcomes will be tangible and actionable, and we have obtained commitments from the highest levels to put the necessary resources behind them.

Third, we are implementing design principles that IMO set the standard for such meetings, within Oracle or elsewhere. Most important among them is a commitment to dogfood cuisine: for example, all communications about meeting logistics occur via a private Facebook group, and the summit's DNA is made of Open Space memes. Attendees are also expected to do some homework assignments we've formulated, which include hands-on use of standard-issue tools (Twitter, Google Reader, etc.) for today's Marketing 2.0 professional.

Most important of all, the summit's title belies its importance for Oracle. Although ostensibly focused on marketing (we work in the marketing org, after all), the meeting has implications for the entire company - not only in terms of how we work together, but in terms of how we interact with customers, partners, observers, and prospects. The expectation is that the entire marketing org will become internal evangelists for transparency, community, and user participation.

In short, this is a milestone for Oracle. Personally, I can't wait. (And it will be loads of fun, too.)

By the way, I fully intend to document the progress of this summit on an ongoing basis � in terms of planning as well as execution. So yes, you will see blogging, twittering, wiki-work, and video from me as it unfolds (in late January), and during the afterglow.

Fascinating that a little game of blog-tag would evolve into the latest Oracle Blogosphere teapot tempest (nicely summarized here by Eddie Awad & commenters). Interestingly, the game has since spilled over into the wider Blogoverse.

Whether a blog-tag = spam is not a topic I would have foreseen in this venue. Just goes to show you that a community has organic attributes - it comprises many mutually balancing interests, such as ego/atruism, privacy/desire to share, and so on. Which is another way of saying: one person's nourishment is another person's poison, and often you don't know which is which until after the fact.

Update: Let me add that I am in the "nourishment" category. The reception the game received is proof enough that most (but not all) would agree; the beauty of a blog is that it can be a vehicle for creative self-expression, in which the reader learns something about the writer - not just dry facts.

Update: EI Dennis Howlett takes notice of this debate in his ZDnet blog.

This on the eve of the release of a quarterly Critical Patch Update: Evidence that suggests two-thirds of Oracle DBAs may not bother themselves with applying security patches.

The sample involved is a small one (some 300 people), but the alarm bells should go off nonetheless.

Does this appear to be an accurate estimate? Interested in your thoughts.

Incredible; when I first started blogging two or three years ago, there were only one or two Oracle-related blog aggregators to be found. Today, there are 10 of which I am aware. (If one is missing from this wiki page, go ahead and add it.)

How wonderful to be an Oracle user these days; the community resources available to you are simply tremendous.

I note a lot of pent-up demand for Oracle "meetups" across the world - many people interested in them, but few organizers. (Yeah, there's also a lot of spam in here. Meetup.com needs to work on that.)

If you're an Oracle ACE this is a great opportunity to share your knowledge and enthusiasm with the rest of the community. Similarly, user groups can use this tool to great advantage (as MySQL users have).

Or, maybe you just want to find people in your area interested in the tantalizing combination of beer and PL/SQL. Meetup.com is a great way to do that.

Sorry to say it but according to its guardian, Brian Duff, the Orablogs aggregator is on its way to the scrap heap.

Orablogs was the first Oracle-centric blog aggregator of which I am aware, and in fact initially served as a blogging platform for Oracle employees as well. (My first Oracle blog was based there.)

Certainly there are plenty of alternatives available today, but Orablogs was instrumental in jump-starting - providing the "Big Bang", as it were - for the Oracle blogger community.

Brian and Orablogs, many thanks for your service.

The Oracle Marketing 2.0 Leaders Summit agenda is set, the space is booked, the whiteboards are in place, and the participants have arrived.

The event design is ingenious. Gordon Rudow, its principal architect, has drafted an extremely interesting step-wise process that will guide a set of cross-functional groups, working in parallel, toward a  "big idea." The end game is a voting process in which ideas are scored based on innovation, feasibility, and ROI - with points awarded for presentation creativity as well.

Several design principles are of note here - particularly the presence of a "rogue" group, which has the specific charter of breaking all the rules. (Think of it as a startup analog - the joker in the deck. What better mean of recognizing that there's always more agile competition out there?) Transparency is an important principle; groups can observe each other at anytime, and an internal recorder will be documenting the entire process as it occurs via wiki. And the fact that groups will convene several times a day to share what they've learned implies that innovation is intended to be the brainchild of collaboration.

There will be some challenges however. As a group facilitator (along with radu43 himself - Marius Ciortea - and AppsLab Jake, among others), it could be difficult to draw a clear line between facilitation and participation/leadership. Starting tomorrow, I'll share my experience with you as best I can - tune in here, or follow me via Twitter.

My first video report - not much to see yet, but you'll see our progress by tomorrow AM!

I apologize not providing frequent updates; being a facilitator is a lot of work and the wifi onsite is not so good.

Day 1 has been extremely informative; it got off to a spicy start with a proposal from AppsLab Jake (also a facilitator) to merge our two groups (which we accepted). How Oracle of us! An immediate effect on the marketplace via M&A.

I'm not going to take you through every step of the process since then - TMI anyway - but suffice it to say that many common threads or memes have emerged, with much assistance from our meeting uber-facilitator Gordon Rudow. Allow me to pose them as a set of questions:

1. What does it mean to be "transparent", in the context of selling enterprise software?
2. Is it even in our DNA to be so, and if not, would we be doing it a "disservice" to be more transparent?
3. Is Web 2.0 a technology, a philosophy, both/neither?
4. Does giving up control result in a gaining of influence?
5. Is our salesforce a stakeholder in this process, or a distraction?
6. Should we be making evolutionary changes or revolutionary ones? Can the former have revolutionary implications?

I'll follow up tomorrow with some video that will punctuate some of these discussions...