Wednesday, February 01, 2006

How do you pronounce Oracle Application Express?

Okay, so HTMLDB was a bit of a mouthful but it's still a good three syllables short of Oracle Application Express. And at least it was short to type. OAE is no good either. It sounds like Tom just after Jerry whacks his toe with a hammer. Oh!Eh!Eee!

I expect the creatives in Marketing have sunk many martinis into the quest for a new name but this one is just not as meaningful as HTMLDB. Furthermore, given that we already have Oracle Applications, Oracle Express and Oracle Express Edition this new name just seems destined to cause confusion. Has Larry imposed some kind of budget on the number of words that can be used in products names?

One of the good things about Raptor is its cool name. That is a name clearly targetted at hax0r d00dz (or least people who got into computing through Amiga and Spectrum games). What we need is a similar cool and easy to pronounce name for HTMLDB. Not another dinosaur. Something cuter, friendlier but just as smart. Project Meerkat anybody?

Update


Since posting this it has occured to me that a compromise solution could be to use the same convention as when Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol. Not OAE but The Application Formerly Known As HTMLDB, which gives us the very nice acronym TAFKAH ("As Ivor Jones awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect").

7 comments:

Laurent Schneider said...

let's guess how they will name raptor when it goes to production... probably something like Oracle Express Application LOL

SydOracle said...

I added a poll on my blog which has had 28 responses with most going to APEX. Personally, I preferred AXE but willing to go with the majority here.

http://igor-db.blogspot.com/2006/01/new-name-for-htmldb-poll.html

Anonymous said...

Don't worry. They will pick a nick name for it that is easy to pronounce. Like how "Application Server" is usually called "App Server".

Also, the name "Application Express" is a good choice because it is synonymous with RAD.

APC said...

AXE and APEX are obvious abbreviations but not distinctive enough to be meaningful, and as Eddie Awad has pointed out APEX is already taken. I'm going to stick with TAFKAH for a while: http://igor-db.blogspot.com/2006/01/new-name-for-htmldb-poll.html#comments

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Could you please share the PL/SQL coding standards

My Mail Id is shomit.mohan@tcs.com

regards

Shomit

Laurent Schneider said...

in case you did not notice it, the raptor project will be named "Oracle SQL Developer" : forum oracle com

APC said...

>> "Oracle SQL Developer"

Bo-ring!!!