Recent Posts by Bob Rhubart

On March 27, 2009 the Arch2Arch Podcast released its first program. Over nearly ten years, more than 360 programs, and several name changes, what is now known as the Oracle Groundbreakers Podcast enters 2019 as the most downloaded Oracle podcast, a status it has maintained since early 2015. The credit for that accomplishment is shared by an incredible roster of panelists who have taken the time to lend their voices and share their insight and expertise, and by a faithful and...

The fans can't be wrong, and the numbers don't lie.  The list of the Top Ten 2 Minute Tech Tips for 2018 includes insight and expertise covering containers, bots, REST APIs, database performance, and more, as contributed by experts from across the community.  What's a 2 Minute Tech Tip? As the title implies, a 2 Minute Tech Tip is a short video that presents useful technical information for developers, architects, DBAs, and other roles. 2MTTs cover a wide range of topics, and...

American inventor Thomas Edison once said, “Hell, there are no rules here. We're trying to accomplish something.” What we hope to accomplish with this episode of the Groundbreaker Podcast is an exploration of the idea that the evolution in today’s architectures makes it advantageous, perhaps even necessary, to challenge some long-established concepts that have achieved “golden rule” status as they apply to the use of databases. Does ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and...

The meandering career of Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador Maurice Naftalin By Bob Rhubart January/February 2019 In the early ’60s in a public library in a small English town, a teenage Maurice Naftalin took the first step in a decades-long career when he discovered a book on the ALGOL 60 programming language. “I thought, ‘This looks like it would be a lot of fun,’” Naftalin says. But he wouldn’t have access to a computer until 1971 while pursuing a postgraduate degree in chemical...

Are you a RESTafarian? Or are you a GraphQL aficionado? Either way you'll want to listen to the latest Oracle Groundbreaker Podcast, as a panel of experts weighs the pros and cons of each technology. Representational State Transfer, known to its friends as REST, has been around for nearly two decades and has a substantial following. GraphQL, on the other hand, became publicly available in 2015, and only a few weeks ago moved under the control of the GraphQL Foundation, a...

A common thread connecting the small army of IT professionals I've met over the last 20 years is that their interest in technology developed when they were very young, and that youthful interest grew into a full-fledged career. That's truly wonderful. But what happens if a young person never has a chance to develop that interest? And what can be done to draw those young people to careers in technology? In this Oracle Groundbreakers Podcast extra you will meet someone who is...

The first thing you may notice when listening to this program is that the podcast has undergone another name change. What was once the Oracle Developer Community Podcast is now the Oracle Groundbreakers Podcast. A little change is good now and then, and this is exactly that, a little change. And it is by no coincidence that change is the core theme of this program, how various trends and technologies have shaped the IT landscape over the past year, and how other trends will...

Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador Loiane Groner shapes the real world. By Bob Rhubart November/December 2018 As a teenager, when Loiane Groner selected computer science as a course of university study, she wasn’t thinking about computer programming or coding. “I thought that I was going to learn how to fix computers,” she explains. “In Brazil you have to choose your major before you go to college,” Groner says. “I chose computer science because I liked computers. That was the only...

"Like buying a Ferrari and towing it around with a horse." That's how Java Champion and Microservices Patterns (Manning Publications) author Chris Richardson describes the approach some organizations take to implementing microservices. It's often a matter of faulty motivation.  In helping organizations around the world get started with microservices, the first question Chris asks his clients is, "Why do you want microservices?" The responses are often surprising. "I've talked...