Wednesday 14 September 2011

All Things Oracle (or LeBron James's Explain Plan)

I don't know if you follow basketball, but if you do - and, perhaps, even if you don't - you will know that when, in 2010, the best basketball player in the world, LeBron James, decided to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers he organised a one-hour television show to announce which team he had chosen to join. The Decision, as the 'extravaganza' was called was broadcast on ESPN and got 10 million viewers.

I was not one of them. But I'm going to assume that if 10 million people - more than the populations of Finland and Norway put together - watched it, it must have featured gorgeous cheerleaders, dressed in a blur of motion and very little else, dancing around, joyfully pumping the air with their pompoms as LeBron explained his plan to join a new team.

No? No cheerleaders? Not even one? Well, in that case it's really lucky you're here, cos I've got a dozen cheerleaders whooping and dancing all around my tiny flat as I prepare to make this announcement.

Hey, take your eyes off them! Focus on me.

I have decided to join the All Things Oracle team. [Insert fanfare here.]

This does not mean that I will be abandoning this blog. Quite the contrary, I am hoping that contributing to All Things Oracle will exercise my blog muscles and get me into the habit of blogging here more regularly. My plan is that I will continue to blog about my trials and triumphs with Apex here, while writing about the other facets of Oracle that I am interested in - Oracle Forms and the database in general - over at ATO. (I have already contributed pieces on regular expressions and autonomous transactions.)

ATO is brought to you by the guys at Red Gate software, and their ambition is to turn it into a hub for Oracle developers and DBAs by publishing original content and by pointing readers in the direction of useful information elsewhere. To achieve this they have assembled a formidable team of experts: I've studied that list and I cannot see one weak link ... oh, there I am! The fields covered include database tuning, Apex, system architecture, Forms, database administration, warehousing and much more.

So make sure you add the ATO rss feed to your reader and that you click on their links whenever you google stuff on bing or bing stuff on google.

Now please go back to watching the cheerleaders. And enjoy the champagne - it, er, comes from France.