My vision here is to make a place where DBA’s, developers, Oracle “grey beards” and other battle-scarred veteran (and new) techies get together and tell each other their war stories and have some fun. I’ve always enjoyed good times with other technical professionals [mostly around Oracle Database] where we would (over a beer or in other down time) share war stories on projects we’ve worked on. These stories are usually hilarious, probably because of the focus around failures, but sometimes, the stories involve interesting or unexpected successes. By sharing our experiences and insights from the trenches, we can not only mentor one another, but we can likely avoid for ourselves, critical mistakes in the future [“iron sharpens iron”]. Also sharing our experience is often the best salve for the pain associated with the battles [like the day I killed the VAX twice in one day with one SQL statement]. In my experience a lot of learning that goes on when we make mistakes. Have you ever seen someone make “Database 101” mistakes that you have made yourself? Thought so! Not surprising, because without experience/knowledge/capability in the proper context it’s nearly impossible to do enough pre-planning to anticipate what can go wrong before it goes wrong. Where do you learn your lessons of life? In my career, a lot of learning has been in the “heat of battle” solving business critical problems; then in the lull between battles, I take the time to build on what I’ve learned and build on my bag-of-tricks** to make it easier to solve similar problems in the future.
** Bag-of-Tricks
As a kid I was impressed by Felix the Cat (cartoon character) [I guess I’m dating myself and admitting I watched too much TV]. Felix would get himself into some kind of trouble and at the last moment reach into his bag-of-tricks with a solution to save the day. Early in my Oracle career [goes back to Oracle V4 in 1985*], I would learn of various SQL queries against the data dictionary and other ways to work your way through what’s going on under the covers in Oracle. I was struggling for what to call the directory where I kept this code, a light bulb goes on and I decided on using Felix’s bag-of-tricks as a metaphor. So, all new capabilities for introspecting the database, documents, … go into my bag-of-tricks.
*1985
This was a very different world from what we now experience: Imagine no internet, which meant if you wanted to research new Oracle DBA and developer ideas, you had to find a conference and call/write to them and buy a hard copy of their proceedings, then pour through it. In 1985, Oracle (in my opinion) was the best relational database on the market, in part because it ran on many more platforms than it competitor. Believe it or not, in 1987, I ran Oracle on one of the original 8086 microcomputers (8-megahertz clock speed) with 640K of memory and a 5 meg hard drive. A few years later, I remember hiring a consultant from Oracle to help us build a database with a 30 meg SGA (almost unheard of or at least very uncommon) in Oracle Version 5.
Appeal
That’s it for now. Please contact me if you are interested in having your war story included. Of course, “the stories you are about to hear are true, only the names have been changed to protect the innocent” [some of you old timers will recall where this quote is from].