Tony Blair describes the arguments in favour of his new anti-terrorist legislation as, "compelling". This is because if you disagree you will be arrested and put into a cell until you realise your fears about human rights abuses are groundless. Which brings me to David Mery. I gather this has been slashdotted but I only just heard about it.
Mery is a computer geek who has an unhealthy obsession with Bill Gates's Basic compiler for the Altair. On 28th July this year he was arrested for being in possession of a French accent and a thick jacket in a London tube station. In 1979 who would have thought that, twenty-five years on, policing practice would be based on a Not The Nine O'Clock News sketch?
Eventually Mery was released and his case has been marked No Further Action. But three months on he has still not had his confiscated computers returned. And, of course, being arrested for suspected terrorist activity will pose Mery an interesting hurdle at US Immigration and Border Control, if he ever decides to try to visit the States. Still I suppose he should count himself lucky not to have been shot eight times in the back of the head.
As someone who lives in south London and who uses the tube almost every day of his life, of course I back the police in the struggle against the Jihadists. But I too carry my laptop in a backpack. Does that mean I could be arrested because I meet some apparently arbitrary criteria? Ultimately, the Jihadists are trying to destroy a free society and replace it with one in which the individual's thoughts and actions are constrained by the pronouncements of official interpreters of divinely-given law. But, if we do this to ourselves, it won't matter that the name of the God is different, the Jihadists will still have won.
Monday, October 17, 2005
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Prioritisation
In his latest article Joel Spolsky describes a workshop to prioritise features for the next version of his FogBugz software package. Like a lot of Joel's approaches it's both radical and plain commonsense. Incidentally it's strange that in our high tech industry all the best ideas seem to hinge on creative use of index cards.
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Oracle: a suitable career for a young person?
A while back someone posted a pertinent question on the OTN DB forum, Is it Worth to be DBA?. The poster was in their last year of college, studying computing. They were wanted advice on the merits of various different technical jobs: sysadmin, networks, DBA. Alas they never replied my response (how did they want to measure worth: salary, intrinsic job interest, long term career prospects, fringe benefits?) and the thread withered.
Still, the question remains: how should we advise a young person wondering whether to become an Oracle DBA? Obviously being an Oracle practioner has done well by me and many of the readers of this blog. It's been my prime focus of work for thirteen years, and there's still some juice in it yet. For most of that time I have been a developer, designer and latterly architect but my time spent doing DBA work has undoubtedly informed my knowledge of Oracle. It is good for everybody who builds Oracle systems to understand the database from the perspective of a DBA, because in production the application is only going to run as well as the database permits.
Whilst I was pondering this question someone else pops up, asking how they get job as a DBA. I do find this desire to become a DBA slightly puzzling. The work, particularly in production, is generally dull except when it gets exciting, and that's when you remember that "May you live in interesting times!" is a Chinese curse. Being a DBA requires you to know the purpose of 257 parameters, 266 V$ views, 415 DBA% views, let's not forget the the X$ views... There's dry stuff like sizing redo logs, taking backups, applying patches, running installation scripts written by developers who haven't tested them, etc, etc. What precisely is the allure?
Partly it's the mystique of being in the know. The DBA is the gatekeeper, the person with the authority to run your code in production, the one who can tell you why your code is running like a three-legged dog in a vat of cold treacle, the person who laughs when you ask them to make the USERS tablespace bigger because you keep getting this ORA-1555 error. Knowing the SYSDBA password is the database equivalent of the sysadmin's
Also, being a DBA is a glamorous job. It's not really of course, but most of the luminaries of the Oracle technical world are (or seem capable of being) DBAs: Tom Kyte, Jonathon Lewis, Connor MacDonald, Cary Milsap, Mogens Noegaard, the list goes on. But how many App Server gurus can you name? If you're developer, who is there to look up to? Steven Feuerstein and, er, that's it. (I know if you're into Java you could cite Steve Muench and Duncan Mills, but Java with Oracle is a distraction.)
So everybody wants to be a DBA because it's all about the data(base). Does that mean a person leaving university should try to become an Oracle DBA? Almost certainly not. There's a reeason why most DBAs are gnarled, bearded men: we need experience as well as knowledge before we are ready to become a DBA. It's just not a role for a neophyte. Besides, with the increasing commodisation of databases the role of the DBA is going to decrease in importance and sustained interest for the majority of people. Not to mention considerations of whether Oracle is a legacy technology.
If long term career prospects are the main concern I think a fresh graduate with a technical bent should get into networks: database, platforms, operating systems will come and go but everything about computing in the foreseeable future will still require networks. And with the rise of wireless the amount of time spent crawling under desks should be greatly reduced. If salary is their main driver then a graduate should seek to get into management, which mainly requires shedding all their technical knowledge as soon as possible.
However, we all spend the majority of the day, most days of our life at work so it is important to do something that continually engages us. There's no doubt that most Oracle roles are capable of offering stimulating work alongside the humdrum. How much time we spend doing the latter over the former is a measure of our talent. Good people understand the need to do the tedious stuff in order to get the interesting work right, so do it well and quickly; the very best know how to spin the dross into gold.
But for a job that's interesting day after day, that's full of surprise, delight and moments of wonder, that's always worthwhile despite all the poop it entails? Well, there's only parenthood. Nothing else comes close. Still, maybe not the thing to do right after graduation (unless gowns and mortarboards make you hot).
Still, the question remains: how should we advise a young person wondering whether to become an Oracle DBA? Obviously being an Oracle practioner has done well by me and many of the readers of this blog. It's been my prime focus of work for thirteen years, and there's still some juice in it yet. For most of that time I have been a developer, designer and latterly architect but my time spent doing DBA work has undoubtedly informed my knowledge of Oracle. It is good for everybody who builds Oracle systems to understand the database from the perspective of a DBA, because in production the application is only going to run as well as the database permits.
Whilst I was pondering this question someone else pops up, asking how they get job as a DBA. I do find this desire to become a DBA slightly puzzling. The work, particularly in production, is generally dull except when it gets exciting, and that's when you remember that "May you live in interesting times!" is a Chinese curse. Being a DBA requires you to know the purpose of 257 parameters, 266 V$ views, 415 DBA% views, let's not forget the the X$ views... There's dry stuff like sizing redo logs, taking backups, applying patches, running installation scripts written by developers who haven't tested them, etc, etc. What precisely is the allure?
Partly it's the mystique of being in the know. The DBA is the gatekeeper, the person with the authority to run your code in production, the one who can tell you why your code is running like a three-legged dog in a vat of cold treacle, the person who laughs when you ask them to make the USERS tablespace bigger because you keep getting this ORA-1555 error. Knowing the SYSDBA password is the database equivalent of the sysadmin's
got root? T-shirt. In fact, the DBAs and the sysadmins tend to inhabit the same room (and indeed are quite often the same people) but it is easier for a SQL developer to move into being a DBA than it is to become a *nix administrator. Also, being a DBA is a glamorous job. It's not really of course, but most of the luminaries of the Oracle technical world are (or seem capable of being) DBAs: Tom Kyte, Jonathon Lewis, Connor MacDonald, Cary Milsap, Mogens Noegaard, the list goes on. But how many App Server gurus can you name? If you're developer, who is there to look up to? Steven Feuerstein and, er, that's it. (I know if you're into Java you could cite Steve Muench and Duncan Mills, but Java with Oracle is a distraction.)
So everybody wants to be a DBA because it's all about the data(base). Does that mean a person leaving university should try to become an Oracle DBA? Almost certainly not. There's a reeason why most DBAs are gnarled, bearded men: we need experience as well as knowledge before we are ready to become a DBA. It's just not a role for a neophyte. Besides, with the increasing commodisation of databases the role of the DBA is going to decrease in importance and sustained interest for the majority of people. Not to mention considerations of whether Oracle is a legacy technology.
If long term career prospects are the main concern I think a fresh graduate with a technical bent should get into networks: database, platforms, operating systems will come and go but everything about computing in the foreseeable future will still require networks. And with the rise of wireless the amount of time spent crawling under desks should be greatly reduced. If salary is their main driver then a graduate should seek to get into management, which mainly requires shedding all their technical knowledge as soon as possible.
However, we all spend the majority of the day, most days of our life at work so it is important to do something that continually engages us. There's no doubt that most Oracle roles are capable of offering stimulating work alongside the humdrum. How much time we spend doing the latter over the former is a measure of our talent. Good people understand the need to do the tedious stuff in order to get the interesting work right, so do it well and quickly; the very best know how to spin the dross into gold.
But for a job that's interesting day after day, that's full of surprise, delight and moments of wonder, that's always worthwhile despite all the poop it entails? Well, there's only parenthood. Nothing else comes close. Still, maybe not the thing to do right after graduation (unless gowns and mortarboards make you hot).
Monday, October 10, 2005
MS Office: Get your re-org boots!
Jakob Neilsen's latest Alertbox draws our attention to the iminent redesign of the MS Office user interface. Not the least of the woes ahead will be the learning of a new acronym: WYGIWYS, What You Get Is What You See. Practice it now, it's a tough one to get right.
Apparently Office 2003 is so full of functionality that many users cannot locate many of the features. Who'd have thunk it? Anyway, to solve this problem Microsoft are rejigging the various menus, toolbars and dropdowns in favour of coherently organised Command Tabs. This sounds mildly useful. More interesting is the WYGIWYS bit, whereby we format the document by choosing our desired result from a gallery of examples. As somebody is frequently driven to apoplectic fury by my inability to switch off some particular embedded Word style object I think any improvement to Word format styles is to be welcomed. Of course want I really want is a codes pane like WordPerfect had but I can't see that coming soon.
What does it all mean? Well there's some learning coming up for those of us who are bound to the corporately-supplied toolset. There's possibly some big yokks for the Open Office and Mac sparts. But just suppose Microsoft pulls it off. A new UI not swiped off Apple/Xerox that delivers real productivity gains to ordinary users: wouldn't that be cool?
Apparently Office 2003 is so full of functionality that many users cannot locate many of the features. Who'd have thunk it? Anyway, to solve this problem Microsoft are rejigging the various menus, toolbars and dropdowns in favour of coherently organised Command Tabs. This sounds mildly useful. More interesting is the WYGIWYS bit, whereby we format the document by choosing our desired result from a gallery of examples. As somebody is frequently driven to apoplectic fury by my inability to switch off some particular embedded Word style object I think any improvement to Word format styles is to be welcomed. Of course want I really want is a codes pane like WordPerfect had but I can't see that coming soon.
What does it all mean? Well there's some learning coming up for those of us who are bound to the corporately-supplied toolset. There's possibly some big yokks for the Open Office and Mac sparts. But just suppose Microsoft pulls it off. A new UI not swiped off Apple/Xerox that delivers real productivity gains to ordinary users: wouldn't that be cool?
Oracle Metalink: Don't shoot the pianist
Laurent Schneider recently posted on his bad Metalink experiences. Let me show you my scars...
My first stand-out bad experience was an iTAR on generating checkboxes in JavaServerPages back in the days of JDeveloper 3.0. After two weeks of hassling I got told there was a palette with a Checkbox icon in the JDeveloper IDE. This much I knew already: it was for Swing programs. I tried to explain about the difference between Java for client/server and web but the iTAR got closed anyway. This was when the Java language support was still done by the database group, who really didn't understand building client-facing applications at all. One of our Java brains figured it out eventually.
The second bad experience was a year or so later. We were having some difficulties with BC4J which dragged on without resolution. The support guy, exasperated, asked why we were using BC4J as "Nobody was using, even in Oracle". I posted that to an ODTUG list, to stir up a response. Oh boy. Steve Muench fired an enraged e-mail back to ODTUG. I had the Support manager on the phone. I expect the poor second-line drone caught it in the shorts (which I do feel bad about. Sorry, whoever you were). Did we get our problem resolved? Again, eventually. Again, this was Java. Oracle really took a long time to sort out its support for Java. But that's how I discovered the OTN forums, so it wasn't all terrible.
The third bad experience, was some kind of database thing, I forget what. The first-liner resolved it to his satisfaction and closed the iTAR. I called back to explain that he had mis-read what I had typed in the iTAR and that his "solution" solved a completely different problem. He said, 'You'll have to open another TAR.' Now that's a lot of typing to do all over again. It took seven words, 'I want to speak to your manager', to get the TAR re-opened, and resolved pretty quickly thereafter.
I've been using Metalink and Support for over ten years now and I think three memorably bad experiences in that time is pretty good going. Most iTARs get solved, and get solved within a reasonable time. Of course, not working in production means that I can take a more relaxed attitude towards rsolution time.
The real problem with Metalink is the interface. When I first started using Support it was all done with phone calls. Which was great: I almost always got someone who was knowledgeable, so most TARs were actually resolved on the phone or else they turned out to be bugs, (As I was using Designer 1.2 on Windows for Workgroups 3.1.1 to generate Forms 4.5 there were a lot of bugs). What that meant was I tended to phone up Supoort to get answers to questions of the "How do I do ...?" variety. Now that iTARs have to be raised through a web interface everything takes much longer. There just isn't the immediacy of a phone call. In fact the iTAR process is so slow it's generally a lot quicker to use the Metalink search engine or Google. As a consequence I never contact support with a "How do I do ... ?" question. They're smart, these Oracle guys.
Of course, the Metalink repository is not without it's problems. Why is it so hard to filter out anything to do with RdB or Apps of any flavour? Why can't I explicitly search for (or exclude) stuff by document type (release installation note, error report, How To bulletin)? Why is the weighting of documents so poor? It used to be that the first result when search for an error number was the OERR document. Now it's quite frequently number 79/100. The answer is quite simple: poor metadata. The Metalink repository needs much better tagging. Of course there must be so many documents in the database you can see why nobody want's to undertake the task.
But then, but then. Only last week I started to raise a TAR because I had failed to find anything helpful in the repository. having typed it all in the TAR workflow suggested six documents that might solve my issue, and the second one did. Result! So the information is there, it's just sometimes so hard to find it.
It's easy to knock Metalink, but who would really want to be without it?
My first stand-out bad experience was an iTAR on generating checkboxes in JavaServerPages back in the days of JDeveloper 3.0. After two weeks of hassling I got told there was a palette with a Checkbox icon in the JDeveloper IDE. This much I knew already: it was for Swing programs. I tried to explain about the difference between Java for client/server and web but the iTAR got closed anyway. This was when the Java language support was still done by the database group, who really didn't understand building client-facing applications at all. One of our Java brains figured it out eventually.
The second bad experience was a year or so later. We were having some difficulties with BC4J which dragged on without resolution. The support guy, exasperated, asked why we were using BC4J as "Nobody was using, even in Oracle". I posted that to an ODTUG list, to stir up a response. Oh boy. Steve Muench fired an enraged e-mail back to ODTUG. I had the Support manager on the phone. I expect the poor second-line drone caught it in the shorts (which I do feel bad about. Sorry, whoever you were). Did we get our problem resolved? Again, eventually. Again, this was Java. Oracle really took a long time to sort out its support for Java. But that's how I discovered the OTN forums, so it wasn't all terrible.
The third bad experience, was some kind of database thing, I forget what. The first-liner resolved it to his satisfaction and closed the iTAR. I called back to explain that he had mis-read what I had typed in the iTAR and that his "solution" solved a completely different problem. He said, 'You'll have to open another TAR.' Now that's a lot of typing to do all over again. It took seven words, 'I want to speak to your manager', to get the TAR re-opened, and resolved pretty quickly thereafter.
I've been using Metalink and Support for over ten years now and I think three memorably bad experiences in that time is pretty good going. Most iTARs get solved, and get solved within a reasonable time. Of course, not working in production means that I can take a more relaxed attitude towards rsolution time.
The real problem with Metalink is the interface. When I first started using Support it was all done with phone calls. Which was great: I almost always got someone who was knowledgeable, so most TARs were actually resolved on the phone or else they turned out to be bugs, (As I was using Designer 1.2 on Windows for Workgroups 3.1.1 to generate Forms 4.5 there were a lot of bugs). What that meant was I tended to phone up Supoort to get answers to questions of the "How do I do ...?" variety. Now that iTARs have to be raised through a web interface everything takes much longer. There just isn't the immediacy of a phone call. In fact the iTAR process is so slow it's generally a lot quicker to use the Metalink search engine or Google. As a consequence I never contact support with a "How do I do ... ?" question. They're smart, these Oracle guys.
Of course, the Metalink repository is not without it's problems. Why is it so hard to filter out anything to do with RdB or Apps of any flavour? Why can't I explicitly search for (or exclude) stuff by document type (release installation note, error report, How To bulletin)? Why is the weighting of documents so poor? It used to be that the first result when search for an error number was the OERR document. Now it's quite frequently number 79/100. The answer is quite simple: poor metadata. The Metalink repository needs much better tagging. Of course there must be so many documents in the database you can see why nobody want's to undertake the task.
But then, but then. Only last week I started to raise a TAR because I had failed to find anything helpful in the repository. having typed it all in the TAR workflow suggested six documents that might solve my issue, and the second one did. Result! So the information is there, it's just sometimes so hard to find it.
It's easy to knock Metalink, but who would really want to be without it?
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
OOW2K5: The wrap up
It's oh so nice to go travellin'
But it's so much nicer, yes it's so much nicer to come home
Sinatra sang that. Going to OpenWorld this year was great but it meant I missed my son starting reception class (kindergarten). Fortunately I did get back in time to collect Fred at the end of his first full day: his smile when he saw me is obviously the thing that I will treasure most from the week.
Anyway, Oracle Open World 2005. Now that I am back at work what have I been telling people about the trip?
Magnitude
Thirty-five thousand attendees. That's a small town. It's partly a sign of Oracle's success as a product but also an artifact of the major acquisitions over the last twelve months. There were large contingents of JD Edwards and PeopleSoft customers attending OOW for the first time, obviously trying to get a handle on the nature of this Oracle beast. It will be interesting to see if they attend OOW2K6 in such large numbers. At times the sheer number of attendees was imposing. Yet the conference organisation coped. There was enough food, water, coffee for everybody. Most of the time the queues were not excessive (except at Starbucks in the morning) and usually people got into to their session of first choice. The conference scaled well. It must run on Grid. Speaking of which...
Oracle's Commitment to the Grid Architecture
Probably the single most impressive fact I learned this year was the nature of Oracle's own enterprise set-up: a multi-node cluster of 288 CPUs with a BI layer running against the OLTP layer on the same instance. (By contrast, when 10g was launched at OpenWorld two years ago the reference site for the grid architecture was EA's The Sims Online with eighteen CPUs.) But it's more than just resilience. Grid architecture is becoming a key enabling technology for Oracle. Benefits of implementing the grid cropped up in sessions I attended on security, data warehouse architecture and efficient data loading. Oracle have not quite cracked the manageability angle, there is still an administrative overhead to running a grid. But once it becomes possible for us to treat a grid as if it were a single box then any barrier to take-up should disappear.
Oracle's Commitment to the Open Standards
Project Fusion was the key message of the conference: turning the entire technology stack, from database to portal, into a single suite of integrated, hot pluggable components. The integrated bit is obvious. Of course all the products from a single vendor ought to play nice with each other. The interesting bit is their commitment to open standards, such that we can swap any part of the suite for a similarly compliant product from A N Other vendor. So Oracle is going to certify its E-Business Suite against JBoss and WebSphere. They are even contemplating certification against IBM's DB2 database, although this will depend largely on the attitude of the PeopleSoft and JD Edwards customers towards database flavour. Also openness requires there to be other vendors with standards compliant software, otherwise it's just another form of vendor lock-in.
Utility Computing Revisited
Oracle have gone a bit quiet on this front but Sun seems to be going for it in a big way. It's not going to be long before get a site to host your business app will be a simple as filling in a form of six checkboxes and uploading an RPM.
Data Vault
Currently this product is in Beta but it was the most interesting announcement of the week. Essentially it answers the question, "How can I stop my DBA getting access to my customers' credit card numbers?" With Data Vault we will no longer hust have to trust the integrity of our DBAs. It is a set of packages and practices that separates user management from security policy from system administration. So for instance we will be able to enforce different levels of access in local and remote databases for the same user account created with the same system privileges. We could prevent the DBA from querying any table with sensitive business data despite her possession of the SELECT ANY TABLE privilege. We will be able to prevent anybody issuing DDL commands during business hours. Data Vault will feature a robust audit function impervious to tampering by even a DBA. Of course, it will not be bulletproof, but working around Data Vault should require collusion between at least two and probably three people, which is (we hope) much less likely than a rogue individual.
Steven Feuerstein
Can you believe it's ten years since O'Reilly first published PL/SQL Programming? Me neither. Now that the book weighs in at 1198 pages maybe it's time to same goodbye to the ants on the cover in favour of something of a more suitable scale, such as a (stunned) water buffalo.
Participation
It was nice to meet up with some other ACEs, to put faces and accents (hi Laurent!) to the names. I have a pretty good Namedrop Quotient at the moment.
Oracle seem to have improved the community side of things since two years ago. I attended a couple of get-togethers with a good mix of Oracle and non-Oracle people, and I am sure there were other similar events to which I didn't get invited. The hot technologies in the modern world are those were people can contibute rather than be passive consumers. People feel differently about Java or Python than they do about VB. Participation is the key to a thriving community. By opening up OTN to non-Oracle writers and acknowledging the contribution of non-employees Oracle is moving in the right direction. Although I think it'll be a long time before we're downloading the new version of PL/SQL from SourceForge. Which brings me to...
Badge of the Conference
A freebie from Apress with the slogan, "Life would be so much easier if we just had the source code." Which is very true when you think about it.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
OOW2K5: Running out of steam
Boy these are long days. I seem to be getting more jetlagged not less.
Anyway, did you get to see Larry? At 1:00pm the queue literally stretched round the block. (I am not obsessed with queues, honest.) Anyway I decided not to join the end of the queue and get sunstroke so I headed up to floor 3 in Moscone West to get backache instead. I do think it was the right decision: there was no durm und strang before Larry came on stage and to be frank remarkably little once he did appear. Of course it didn't help that poor TV reception made him sound like Ken Godwin out of the Wheeltappers And Shunters' Social Club. He seemed mortal rather than a colossus bestriding the database world. Flourishing his glasses was a nice touch.
There were no fresh announcements. Pretty much everything Ellison said had already been announced, mainly by Charles Philips on Monday. There was only one joke, a dig at Microsoft. The most interesting thing is how long the Q&A section went on for, overrunning by so much that the sessions after the scheduled break were delayed. Larry obviously relaxed once he'd got all the messages out of the way and could just be spontaneous. Unfortunately I missed most of the questions as my back was giving me gyp. But apparently the ridicule in the media about the multi-core licencing model has struck home, and a new licencing approach is on its way. That is, yet another licencing model is on its way. Is YALM a word? It ought to be.
That's it for me for 2005. This particular thirsty bear is off to Steven Feuerstein's party. Cheers.
Anyway, did you get to see Larry? At 1:00pm the queue literally stretched round the block. (I am not obsessed with queues, honest.) Anyway I decided not to join the end of the queue and get sunstroke so I headed up to floor 3 in Moscone West to get backache instead. I do think it was the right decision: there was no durm und strang before Larry came on stage and to be frank remarkably little once he did appear. Of course it didn't help that poor TV reception made him sound like Ken Godwin out of the Wheeltappers And Shunters' Social Club. He seemed mortal rather than a colossus bestriding the database world. Flourishing his glasses was a nice touch.
There were no fresh announcements. Pretty much everything Ellison said had already been announced, mainly by Charles Philips on Monday. There was only one joke, a dig at Microsoft. The most interesting thing is how long the Q&A section went on for, overrunning by so much that the sessions after the scheduled break were delayed. Larry obviously relaxed once he'd got all the messages out of the way and could just be spontaneous. Unfortunately I missed most of the questions as my back was giving me gyp. But apparently the ridicule in the media about the multi-core licencing model has struck home, and a new licencing approach is on its way. That is, yet another licencing model is on its way. Is YALM a word? It ought to be.
That's it for me for 2005. This particular thirsty bear is off to Steven Feuerstein's party. Cheers.
OOW2K5: Breakfast In America
At the bloggers dinner last night Mark Rittman was commenting on the breakfasts provided in the conference centre. They are called "continental breakfasts" but really they are just cakes and coffee. Mark was saying that the resultant sugar rush makes a good hangover cure (being an abstemious sort of fellow I couldn't possibly comment) but, if supplemented by Coca Cola and Skittles, it also enlives even the dullest of presentations. Well, the organisers must have known the Oracle Bloggers would be in need of a tonic this morning because they've laid on a spread of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, that deep-fried, sugar-coated heart attack in toroidal form. Yummy. Can't stop, must dash!
OOW2K5: Queueing Theory
The large number of attendees is really starting to bite. Queueing, not Total Integration or Project Fusion, is the dominant theme of the conference. Whenever two or three delegates gather together they will discuss the queue for a particular session or lunch or the toilet. The queue to get into Tom Kyte's presentation yesterday morning was so long that even Mark Rittman, ACE of the Year and Oracle Goldster, was unable to blag his way in. The English have a reputation for queueing, but these days it's undeserved. The queues here are really orderly, self-policed single files. The normal English bus stop "queue" is just a bundle waiting for the arrival of a bus to trigger it.
There have been rumours that the Conference might move to somewhere bigger, like Las Vegas, but this seems unlikely to me. Moving events of this magnitude makes turning an oil tanker look like spinning on a penny. In 1995 I got into conversation with a couple of events organisers in a Covent Garden bar. Naturally the talk turned to our plans for the millenium. That was the near future to them: they already knew what they would be doing in 2005. Living ten years in the future must be a very odd way to be, a bit like Philip K Dick's "The World That Jones Made". Another idea that has been mooted by a couple of people now is that the conference could be split into or even three separate events. But it seems to me that if the key message is Total Integration of the entire stack from storage technonolgy through applications to the portal then dis-integrating the conference is sending the wrong message. But let's face it, queues are a nice problem to have. They are a sign of success. It would be a lot worse if the conference was just lonely tumbleweeds blowing the Moscone Centre.
The queue for Scott McNealy's keynote started more than forty-five minutes before his keynote was scheduled to start; the keynote, and that was only supposed to last forty-five minutes. Lucky I brought a good book.
So was Scott worth the rock star treatment? Hmmm, not really. As keynotes by CEOs go he is entertaining. But he telegraphs his punches: if the Powerpoint throws up a picture of Larry you know a joke about expensive suits is coming. And the announcements are a bit underwhelming too. Scott talked about, "Let's have an iPod moment!" But Sunfire X64 4+ is not an iPod moment. If hardware floats your boat then okay. But Sun launching a new server is hardly as radical a change of direction as Apple moving into consumer electronics. Even if that server can run Windows. Still, because of the commitment to "planet-sensitive computing" I think we can say it is a Mini iPod in pastel green moment ;)
The most interesting part of Scott's keynote was the emphasis on zero cost of exit. Give away your software to the Open Source community, keep to open standards and compete on your ability to support your own servers. This is an interesting business model, the apparently exact opposite of vendor lock-in. Of course, being able to leave Sun easily is only half the problem for a CIO. If the competitors are all have lots of proprietary, closed products then where else do you go to avoid being locked-in? Smart.
I went to Dr Paul Dorsey's presentation on "Data Modelling with UML" genuinely expecting a How-To. Silly of me, I really ought to read the abstracts. What we got was a broadside against Oracle for abandoning Designer in favour of JDeveloper. Dr Dorsey is smart, articulate and boy is he ticked off. Paul is the first to state that JDeveloper is a first-class tool for developers. His name remains on the JDeveloper 10g Handbook after all. It's just not a tool for database architects. His frustration is evident and understandable. Apart from anything else, the market for JDeveloper is a small one. The tool is competing against Eclipse. A whole bunch of Java coders will never look at JDeveloper simply because it has the Oracle brand. A whole bunch more won't look at it because they think RDBMS is a dumb idea. And JDeveloper panders to this mindset by allowing Java developers to treat tables as just somewhere to persist objects. Paul was fair, he blasted Rational Rose for exactly the same things.
The key thing is that the same class model must generate the Java objects, the relational tables and the mapping between them. Just as Dr Dorsey started to talk about the only tool around that can do this, the BRIM product he has been refining for years, the battery in his laptop went. Was this sabotage by a black bag special ops team from the JDeveloper group? Who can say? I'm sure Steve Muench has an alibi.
In the evening I went to the Oracle Bloggers dinner organised by Mark Rittman. I'm sure everybody else will blog about it so I won't bother to say much. I was a bit fazed by the barman asking which vodka I wanted in my vodka martini. Er, you know, vodka. Tom queried my choice of a vodka martini, gesturing with his own glass and saying, "It's all about the gin". To which I should have replied (but didn't), "No Tom, it's all about the data".
By the way, am I the only person wondering why the Women In Technology International stand is being manned by a man?
There have been rumours that the Conference might move to somewhere bigger, like Las Vegas, but this seems unlikely to me. Moving events of this magnitude makes turning an oil tanker look like spinning on a penny. In 1995 I got into conversation with a couple of events organisers in a Covent Garden bar. Naturally the talk turned to our plans for the millenium. That was the near future to them: they already knew what they would be doing in 2005. Living ten years in the future must be a very odd way to be, a bit like Philip K Dick's "The World That Jones Made". Another idea that has been mooted by a couple of people now is that the conference could be split into or even three separate events. But it seems to me that if the key message is Total Integration of the entire stack from storage technonolgy through applications to the portal then dis-integrating the conference is sending the wrong message. But let's face it, queues are a nice problem to have. They are a sign of success. It would be a lot worse if the conference was just lonely tumbleweeds blowing the Moscone Centre.
The queue for Scott McNealy's keynote started more than forty-five minutes before his keynote was scheduled to start; the keynote, and that was only supposed to last forty-five minutes. Lucky I brought a good book.
So was Scott worth the rock star treatment? Hmmm, not really. As keynotes by CEOs go he is entertaining. But he telegraphs his punches: if the Powerpoint throws up a picture of Larry you know a joke about expensive suits is coming. And the announcements are a bit underwhelming too. Scott talked about, "Let's have an iPod moment!" But Sunfire X64 4+ is not an iPod moment. If hardware floats your boat then okay. But Sun launching a new server is hardly as radical a change of direction as Apple moving into consumer electronics. Even if that server can run Windows. Still, because of the commitment to "planet-sensitive computing" I think we can say it is a Mini iPod in pastel green moment ;)
The most interesting part of Scott's keynote was the emphasis on zero cost of exit. Give away your software to the Open Source community, keep to open standards and compete on your ability to support your own servers. This is an interesting business model, the apparently exact opposite of vendor lock-in. Of course, being able to leave Sun easily is only half the problem for a CIO. If the competitors are all have lots of proprietary, closed products then where else do you go to avoid being locked-in? Smart.
I went to Dr Paul Dorsey's presentation on "Data Modelling with UML" genuinely expecting a How-To. Silly of me, I really ought to read the abstracts. What we got was a broadside against Oracle for abandoning Designer in favour of JDeveloper. Dr Dorsey is smart, articulate and boy is he ticked off. Paul is the first to state that JDeveloper is a first-class tool for developers. His name remains on the JDeveloper 10g Handbook after all. It's just not a tool for database architects. His frustration is evident and understandable. Apart from anything else, the market for JDeveloper is a small one. The tool is competing against Eclipse. A whole bunch of Java coders will never look at JDeveloper simply because it has the Oracle brand. A whole bunch more won't look at it because they think RDBMS is a dumb idea. And JDeveloper panders to this mindset by allowing Java developers to treat tables as just somewhere to persist objects. Paul was fair, he blasted Rational Rose for exactly the same things.
The key thing is that the same class model must generate the Java objects, the relational tables and the mapping between them. Just as Dr Dorsey started to talk about the only tool around that can do this, the BRIM product he has been refining for years, the battery in his laptop went. Was this sabotage by a black bag special ops team from the JDeveloper group? Who can say? I'm sure Steve Muench has an alibi.
In the evening I went to the Oracle Bloggers dinner organised by Mark Rittman. I'm sure everybody else will blog about it so I won't bother to say much. I was a bit fazed by the barman asking which vodka I wanted in my vodka martini. Er, you know, vodka. Tom queried my choice of a vodka martini, gesturing with his own glass and saying, "It's all about the gin". To which I should have replied (but didn't), "No Tom, it's all about the data".
By the way, am I the only person wondering why the Women In Technology International stand is being manned by a man?
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
OOW2K5: The numbers game
In his keynote yesterday Charles Philips said there were 35 000 attendees at the conference this year and it certainly feels like that. Particularly at the crossroads when we're interchanging between Moscone West and Moscone South; it's not quite Shibuya but it's not far off.
Yesterday I finally got to see Steven Feuerstein (Whom God Preserve) in action. It's 10 years since O'Reilly published the first edition of PL/SQL Programming, which made me feel very old as I bought that version. In fact I was the first kid on my block to have it. Afterwards I decided the time had come to upgrade at the Conference bookshop; I indulged the fan in me and asked Steven to autograph it. Today I court hubris by appearing at the OTN "Meet the Experts" session with Steven and Bryn Llewellyn (PL/SQL product manager). I think we ought to call it, You don't have to be bald to code PL/SQL but it helps. If you're reading this before 10:30am Tuesday 20, come along to the OTN Lounge in Moscone West.
I went to see Kent Graziano's presentation because the title seemed like a Zen paradox: Agile Methods and Data Warehousing. The Agile crowd (Scott Ambler notwithstanding) seem to have a strong antipathy towards databases of any sort so it's not surprising that Kent has had some stick from them over his interpretation of Agile practices. However I think his position is correct. As I have said elsewhere a lot of XP methods are very sensible and can deliver results. So what is wrong with refactoring the definitions to fit different sorts of projects. Agile practioners stress the importance of customer input but they only regard business people as customers. But what is wrong with saying that a BI Report programmer is a customer for an ETL process? Anyway, Kent's presentation has certainly given me some hope that it is possible to apply Agile methods even to apparently glacier-like projects such as datawarehouses.
Juan Loaiza's talk on the future of IT and databases turned out to be a discussion of Oracle's strategy for the next few years. The key messages are Total Integration, Agile Resilience and Unlimited, Unbreakable Platform. Not surprisingly the key technology is the Grid. Oracle have really pressed ahead with this: having grid-enabled the app server and the database they are now working on extending the grid to the storage layer. Fortunately for the SAN manufacturers none of the other database vendors seem to be following Oracle down the database grid road. Oracle's own E-Business suite is run on a single multi-node cluster with 288 CPUs. Of course they need all that crunch because they're running their BI and analytical programs in the same database as the OLTP applications. Now that's eating your own dogfood.
In the evening I tried to enhance my geek factor by attending the Linux Installfest. However, I'm afraid I bailed out when the kernel guys started and went in search of wine. Sorry, Todd. I resisted Laurent Schneider's urging to take the DBA Hot Seat test. This turned out to be a wise decision. I haven't really been a DBA since 8i and as most of the questions seemed to be about 10g features (especially Flashback and ASM) I would have ended up with only a promo T-Shirt, of which I have enough already.
Mind you, walking back to the hotel I could have done with a slogan T-Shirt. The sidewalks were pretty empty apart from the people sleeping on them. The slogan? "I'm not a criminal, I'm walking because I'm English".
Yesterday I finally got to see Steven Feuerstein (Whom God Preserve) in action. It's 10 years since O'Reilly published the first edition of PL/SQL Programming, which made me feel very old as I bought that version. In fact I was the first kid on my block to have it. Afterwards I decided the time had come to upgrade at the Conference bookshop; I indulged the fan in me and asked Steven to autograph it. Today I court hubris by appearing at the OTN "Meet the Experts" session with Steven and Bryn Llewellyn (PL/SQL product manager). I think we ought to call it, You don't have to be bald to code PL/SQL but it helps. If you're reading this before 10:30am Tuesday 20, come along to the OTN Lounge in Moscone West.
I went to see Kent Graziano's presentation because the title seemed like a Zen paradox: Agile Methods and Data Warehousing. The Agile crowd (Scott Ambler notwithstanding) seem to have a strong antipathy towards databases of any sort so it's not surprising that Kent has had some stick from them over his interpretation of Agile practices. However I think his position is correct. As I have said elsewhere a lot of XP methods are very sensible and can deliver results. So what is wrong with refactoring the definitions to fit different sorts of projects. Agile practioners stress the importance of customer input but they only regard business people as customers. But what is wrong with saying that a BI Report programmer is a customer for an ETL process? Anyway, Kent's presentation has certainly given me some hope that it is possible to apply Agile methods even to apparently glacier-like projects such as datawarehouses.
Juan Loaiza's talk on the future of IT and databases turned out to be a discussion of Oracle's strategy for the next few years. The key messages are Total Integration, Agile Resilience and Unlimited, Unbreakable Platform. Not surprisingly the key technology is the Grid. Oracle have really pressed ahead with this: having grid-enabled the app server and the database they are now working on extending the grid to the storage layer. Fortunately for the SAN manufacturers none of the other database vendors seem to be following Oracle down the database grid road. Oracle's own E-Business suite is run on a single multi-node cluster with 288 CPUs. Of course they need all that crunch because they're running their BI and analytical programs in the same database as the OLTP applications. Now that's eating your own dogfood.
In the evening I tried to enhance my geek factor by attending the Linux Installfest. However, I'm afraid I bailed out when the kernel guys started and went in search of wine. Sorry, Todd. I resisted Laurent Schneider's urging to take the DBA Hot Seat test. This turned out to be a wise decision. I haven't really been a DBA since 8i and as most of the questions seemed to be about 10g features (especially Flashback and ASM) I would have ended up with only a promo T-Shirt, of which I have enough already.
Mind you, walking back to the hotel I could have done with a slogan T-Shirt. The sidewalks were pretty empty apart from the people sleeping on them. The slogan? "I'm not a criminal, I'm walking because I'm English".
Monday, September 19, 2005
OOW2K5: "Information Matters"
The warmup to Charles Philip's entrance was some lovely Flash animation with a modish soundtrack of (primarily British) pop rock. U2's "Beautiful Day" consolidated its position as the acme of corporate cool. First New Labour, now Oracle. Tranc techno remains the manadatory choice for soundtracking the videos.
The animation included some interesting phrases - "Information Matters", "Adaptable Process", "Information Driven". My personal favourite is "Execute With Insight"; h I can this see replacing "Terminate with extreme prejudice" amongst a certain sort of geek. Well, me at least. They also included a lovely quote from Ihop Corp endorsing the Data Hub: "we know how to sell more pancakes to our customers", which I think is a message we can all get behind.
Charles Philip's keynote was focused on Project Fusion and Oracle Fusion Architecture. It will be interesting to see whether this amounts to more than a marketing exercise in rebranding but it definitely sounds like Oracle is committed to building a complete technology stack that is both a fully integrated set of modules and a fully open framework in which any individual component can be substituted for another vendor's product. This will be an impressive one if they manage to pull it off.
I'm particularly intrigued to know how Oracle intends to implement all its apps as web services without the XML wrappers killing the performance of the suites. I know Microsoft's approach will be to use proprietary compilation of SOA calls to get the necessary performance. It can do so because it owns the OS and there are enough wholly Microsoft shops for this to be a viable strategy. Oracle can't do the same because they need to remain cross-platform, they don't own any OS and they have this tricky commitment to open standards to live up to. In the meantime, be the first on your block to describe yourself as "Hot-Pluggable!"
The animation included some interesting phrases - "Information Matters", "Adaptable Process", "Information Driven". My personal favourite is "Execute With Insight"; h I can this see replacing "Terminate with extreme prejudice" amongst a certain sort of geek. Well, me at least. They also included a lovely quote from Ihop Corp endorsing the Data Hub: "we know how to sell more pancakes to our customers", which I think is a message we can all get behind.
Charles Philip's keynote was focused on Project Fusion and Oracle Fusion Architecture. It will be interesting to see whether this amounts to more than a marketing exercise in rebranding but it definitely sounds like Oracle is committed to building a complete technology stack that is both a fully integrated set of modules and a fully open framework in which any individual component can be substituted for another vendor's product. This will be an impressive one if they manage to pull it off.
I'm particularly intrigued to know how Oracle intends to implement all its apps as web services without the XML wrappers killing the performance of the suites. I know Microsoft's approach will be to use proprietary compilation of SOA calls to get the necessary performance. It can do so because it owns the OS and there are enough wholly Microsoft shops for this to be a viable strategy. Oracle can't do the same because they need to remain cross-platform, they don't own any OS and they have this tricky commitment to open standards to live up to. In the meantime, be the first on your block to describe yourself as "Hot-Pluggable!"
OOW2K5: Having an ACE time!
It's good to be back in San Francisco attending Oracle Open World 2005, as an ACE. Last time was in 2003 in the days when the ACE program was the OTN Community Award.
This time I'm staying in the Ramada Downtown, a motel so obscure that the cab driver had never heard of it. On the Ramada website it is described as "quaint". Finally I know what Americans mean by the word "quaint": it means just like in the movies. Americans call a sleepy English village quaint because it looks like something out of a Harry Potter film. My hotel is quaint because it looks like the set of an Elmore Leonard adaptation.
It doesn't have room service, just a leaflet for the local pizza delivery place. This is called Extreme Pizza, which is probably the only XP I think we can all agree on. Actually the Ramada is not at all bad. It's just it's so far out the lamp-posts have DB2 banners. Still on a clear day you can see the Marriott Intercontinental (where I got to stay in 2003).
I spent Sunday not being as jet-lagged as I was expecting. In the evening there was a dinner for the ACEs and the Oracle Magazine Editor's Choice Award winners. I got invited twice, as an ACE and a member of the magazine Editorial Board, but only had the one dinner. I did ask Kent Graziano if he was John Spencer, which was (I think) my only bloomer of the evening. Tom Kyte was on my table; at one point he used the word fricking, and he meant it. Tom and Ken Jacobs had a classic contest, matching error messages to the numbers. Tom on the role of the database in modern computing: applications come and go, only the data remains". I also learnt that Ken Jacobs is called Dr DBA after a presentation he did which was based on a television show; it turnes out to be Frasier and not Dr. Ruth (which was my guess).
I also met Mark Rittman, who is the ACE of the Year. He was remarkably coherent for a bad who spent the aftewrnoon in the pub. When I last met him it was in Birmingham, England; he had only just won the OTN Community Award and admired my OTN Expert fleece. I think he's been lobbying OTN to get to SF ever since.
This time I'm staying in the Ramada Downtown, a motel so obscure that the cab driver had never heard of it. On the Ramada website it is described as "quaint". Finally I know what Americans mean by the word "quaint": it means just like in the movies. Americans call a sleepy English village quaint because it looks like something out of a Harry Potter film. My hotel is quaint because it looks like the set of an Elmore Leonard adaptation.
It doesn't have room service, just a leaflet for the local pizza delivery place. This is called Extreme Pizza, which is probably the only XP I think we can all agree on. Actually the Ramada is not at all bad. It's just it's so far out the lamp-posts have DB2 banners. Still on a clear day you can see the Marriott Intercontinental (where I got to stay in 2003).
I spent Sunday not being as jet-lagged as I was expecting. In the evening there was a dinner for the ACEs and the Oracle Magazine Editor's Choice Award winners. I got invited twice, as an ACE and a member of the magazine Editorial Board, but only had the one dinner. I did ask Kent Graziano if he was John Spencer, which was (I think) my only bloomer of the evening. Tom Kyte was on my table; at one point he used the word fricking, and he meant it. Tom and Ken Jacobs had a classic contest, matching error messages to the numbers. Tom on the role of the database in modern computing: applications come and go, only the data remains". I also learnt that Ken Jacobs is called Dr DBA after a presentation he did which was based on a television show; it turnes out to be Frasier and not Dr. Ruth (which was my guess).
I also met Mark Rittman, who is the ACE of the Year. He was remarkably coherent for a bad who spent the aftewrnoon in the pub. When I last met him it was in Birmingham, England; he had only just won the OTN Community Award and admired my OTN Expert fleece. I think he's been lobbying OTN to get to SF ever since.
Monday, September 12, 2005
BCS SPA Meeting
I read Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained in 2000, and it really fired me up. Project manager after project manager looked aghast as I raved, "The software is the design". Colleagues looked shifty when I mentione Pair Programming (I wear a beard, so I knew it wasn't my aftershave). Consequently I've never actually done any XP. However, I am Test Infected: I think Test First coding is the single most useful programming technique in my arsenal.
So it was mainly out of academic interest that I attended this month's BCS SPA session to hear Rachel Davies present an overview of the second edition of "eXtreme Programming Explained". There's been some re-arrangement of the furniture - the XP principles are now explained in a mind-map rather than that confused network diagram, some of the practices have been re-named - but there doesn't seem to be that much that's new.
The only new practice is something called the Informative Workspace, which is basically a visual plan of the project's progress, perhaps implemented as Stories on index cards pinned to the wall. Anybody who is interested can immediately see what the project has achieved and what is yet to be done simply by walking into the project room and looking at the wall. This is another example of the use of low tech in our high tech industry; like using the Hipster PDA instead of a Palm Pilot, the Informative Workspace works precisely because it isn't a computer-oriented approach. After all, whose first action on receiving the latest version of their project's plan in MS Project isn't to print it? Even though it comes out in an eye-wateringly small font (despite printing on A3).
There are some refinements. Simple Design and Refactoring have been amalagmated into a single practice, Incremental Design. Metaphor has been dropped, because hardly anybody used it. Some of the wackier names and concepts (Velocity, the Planning Game) have been renamed to make them more generally acceptable.
In fact, the main thrust seems to be towards making XP less, well, less extreme. The practices are graded into Core and Corollary sets. The practices are optional, in that we can now be doing XP even if we are not using all ten core practices. It's a bit like when SSADM version 4 came out: we can now tailor the method to the needs of our current project. Although I suspect we can't be XP if we're not doing Test First Coding, Pair Programming and Incremental Design.
There is a greater emphasis on continuous validation of the built software. We should always be ready to ship. So, not only are we supposed to test all the time but we are exhorted to do continuous integration all the time. Consequently the automated build and automated integration tests need to run in less than ten minutes. Daily builds have been replaced by Daily Deployments. That's right, into production with new code every day! To me this suggests that Kent Beck hasn't had much experience of dealing with FM-ed shops, where the change control process generally takes four-to-six weeks. In fact XP is still aimed at very small projects. Apparently there is a chapter on scaling XP to large projects but it basically consists of splitting one large project into many small projects, which doesn't seem like a satisfactory solution.
Down the pub afterwards someone remarked that lots of XP is simply obvious good practice and the rest is very dubious. Of course everybody thinks that about XP; if only we could get everybody to agree on which fifty percent of the practices are common sense and which are pants we'd be laughing. My colleague Paul O'Connell reckoned that XP is the product of an industry which has too many programmers and not enough engineers. So I held up my hands as an historian and we had an interesting discussion about the impact of feudalism on Japanese society.
By the way, given that XP is so keen on Pair Programming how come Kent Beck is the sole author of the book?
So it was mainly out of academic interest that I attended this month's BCS SPA session to hear Rachel Davies present an overview of the second edition of "eXtreme Programming Explained". There's been some re-arrangement of the furniture - the XP principles are now explained in a mind-map rather than that confused network diagram, some of the practices have been re-named - but there doesn't seem to be that much that's new.
The only new practice is something called the Informative Workspace, which is basically a visual plan of the project's progress, perhaps implemented as Stories on index cards pinned to the wall. Anybody who is interested can immediately see what the project has achieved and what is yet to be done simply by walking into the project room and looking at the wall. This is another example of the use of low tech in our high tech industry; like using the Hipster PDA instead of a Palm Pilot, the Informative Workspace works precisely because it isn't a computer-oriented approach. After all, whose first action on receiving the latest version of their project's plan in MS Project isn't to print it? Even though it comes out in an eye-wateringly small font (despite printing on A3).
There are some refinements. Simple Design and Refactoring have been amalagmated into a single practice, Incremental Design. Metaphor has been dropped, because hardly anybody used it. Some of the wackier names and concepts (Velocity, the Planning Game) have been renamed to make them more generally acceptable.
In fact, the main thrust seems to be towards making XP less, well, less extreme. The practices are graded into Core and Corollary sets. The practices are optional, in that we can now be doing XP even if we are not using all ten core practices. It's a bit like when SSADM version 4 came out: we can now tailor the method to the needs of our current project. Although I suspect we can't be XP if we're not doing Test First Coding, Pair Programming and Incremental Design.
There is a greater emphasis on continuous validation of the built software. We should always be ready to ship. So, not only are we supposed to test all the time but we are exhorted to do continuous integration all the time. Consequently the automated build and automated integration tests need to run in less than ten minutes. Daily builds have been replaced by Daily Deployments. That's right, into production with new code every day! To me this suggests that Kent Beck hasn't had much experience of dealing with FM-ed shops, where the change control process generally takes four-to-six weeks. In fact XP is still aimed at very small projects. Apparently there is a chapter on scaling XP to large projects but it basically consists of splitting one large project into many small projects, which doesn't seem like a satisfactory solution.
Down the pub afterwards someone remarked that lots of XP is simply obvious good practice and the rest is very dubious. Of course everybody thinks that about XP; if only we could get everybody to agree on which fifty percent of the practices are common sense and which are pants we'd be laughing. My colleague Paul O'Connell reckoned that XP is the product of an industry which has too many programmers and not enough engineers. So I held up my hands as an historian and we had an interesting discussion about the impact of feudalism on Japanese society.
By the way, given that XP is so keen on Pair Programming how come Kent Beck is the sole author of the book?
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Book review: The Best Software Writing: Volume One, edited by Joel Spolsky
The first thing that grabbed me about Best Software Writing is the table of contents. Don't you just want to know "How Many Microsoft Employees Does It Take To Change A Lightbulb?" Or "What To Do When You're Screwed?" Or indeed "Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit" Immediately it's obvious this is not a dry-as-dust tome on programming. Indeed, with the exception of Bruce Eckel's "Strong Typing vs Strong Testing" and Why The Lucky Stiff's canter through Ruby there's barely any programming at all.
What we get instead is writing about writing software, about the processes involved. For instance, Eric Lippert's punchline to the lightbulb joke is actually an amusing piece on change control. There are essays on coding. Ken Arnold argues cogently that it does not really matter which set of coding standards your project uses providing it uses something and everybody adheres to it. I agree. For a long time I have felt that the most useful tool Quest Software sells is not TOAD but PL/Formatter: it obviates all that useless time spent debating, codifying and enforcing layout standards. Apart from anything else coding standards tend to define that which can be defined - capitalisation, indentation, line breaks - when the most important things are: does the program implement the required functionality? Does it do so correctly, reliably and efficiently?
There are pieces about UI design and system design. Gregor Hohpe muses on the way Starbucks sells coffee as a metaphor for exploring messaging architecture. There are essays on project management, hiring developers, remunerating developers, outsourcing developers. There's even stuff about Sales! There are several TLA-splattered mediations on the future of the Web and the current state of the technology used to build it.
As someone who has wrestled with the issues thrown up by building a rich client interface out of JSPs I found some interesting insights in John Gruber's "The Location Field Is The New Command Line". Users want something that works, reliably, rather than something that looks pretty or comes with lots of gee-whizz features. Leon Bambrick makes the same point visually by imagining Google with MS Explorer's search interface. The corollary of this is the importance of methodologies like RAD (DSDM, XP, Agile, whatever). In order to demonstrate that our software works we must put working software in front of users on a regular basis. Otherwise we end up with requirements, specifications and acceptance tests predicated on aesthetics and the quantity of functions included.
The mix of technology is revealing. This is Spolsky's personal choice so the articles are skewed towards Microsoft's products and their technology base. There is C, C++ and VBA. There is a bit of Python and Ruby but almost no Java. There's lots of stuff about front-ends and middle tiers but nothing about databases. Certainly nothing about Oracle. Does this mean there's no good writing about databases or just that Spolsky doesn't read it? Actually, probably the former: most database writing is abstruse lectures about relational theory, uninformed witterings on normalisation or polemical rants about the inferiority of relational databases compared to object-oriented programming. Not many laughs there.
I have been calling these pieces as "essays" but they are an assemblage of various verbal constructs. There are proper essays, true. But there are also blog entries, transcriptions of conference speeches, even cartoon strips. What they have in common is that all are available on the internet. Even the Introduction is published on Joel On Software. What this means is we could click over to Google and by entering the table of contents into the location field assemble a copy of the book very cheaply (free if we print it at work, not that we would ever use our employer's paper for personal printing). So why buy the book?
Well, for a start it's got a nice colophon. And an index. Spolsky adds some insightful introductions and comments to each essay. The book is a nice size for reading on the tube or in the bath, neither of which is yet pratical with a laptop. But primarily, purchasing the book is a way of acknowledging the contribution the authors have made to the software writing community.
What we get instead is writing about writing software, about the processes involved. For instance, Eric Lippert's punchline to the lightbulb joke is actually an amusing piece on change control. There are essays on coding. Ken Arnold argues cogently that it does not really matter which set of coding standards your project uses providing it uses something and everybody adheres to it. I agree. For a long time I have felt that the most useful tool Quest Software sells is not TOAD but PL/Formatter: it obviates all that useless time spent debating, codifying and enforcing layout standards. Apart from anything else coding standards tend to define that which can be defined - capitalisation, indentation, line breaks - when the most important things are: does the program implement the required functionality? Does it do so correctly, reliably and efficiently?
There are pieces about UI design and system design. Gregor Hohpe muses on the way Starbucks sells coffee as a metaphor for exploring messaging architecture. There are essays on project management, hiring developers, remunerating developers, outsourcing developers. There's even stuff about Sales! There are several TLA-splattered mediations on the future of the Web and the current state of the technology used to build it.
As someone who has wrestled with the issues thrown up by building a rich client interface out of JSPs I found some interesting insights in John Gruber's "The Location Field Is The New Command Line". Users want something that works, reliably, rather than something that looks pretty or comes with lots of gee-whizz features. Leon Bambrick makes the same point visually by imagining Google with MS Explorer's search interface. The corollary of this is the importance of methodologies like RAD (DSDM, XP, Agile, whatever). In order to demonstrate that our software works we must put working software in front of users on a regular basis. Otherwise we end up with requirements, specifications and acceptance tests predicated on aesthetics and the quantity of functions included.
The mix of technology is revealing. This is Spolsky's personal choice so the articles are skewed towards Microsoft's products and their technology base. There is C, C++ and VBA. There is a bit of Python and Ruby but almost no Java. There's lots of stuff about front-ends and middle tiers but nothing about databases. Certainly nothing about Oracle. Does this mean there's no good writing about databases or just that Spolsky doesn't read it? Actually, probably the former: most database writing is abstruse lectures about relational theory, uninformed witterings on normalisation or polemical rants about the inferiority of relational databases compared to object-oriented programming. Not many laughs there.
I have been calling these pieces as "essays" but they are an assemblage of various verbal constructs. There are proper essays, true. But there are also blog entries, transcriptions of conference speeches, even cartoon strips. What they have in common is that all are available on the internet. Even the Introduction is published on Joel On Software. What this means is we could click over to Google and by entering the table of contents into the location field assemble a copy of the book very cheaply (free if we print it at work, not that we would ever use our employer's paper for personal printing). So why buy the book?
Well, for a start it's got a nice colophon. And an index. Spolsky adds some insightful introductions and comments to each essay. The book is a nice size for reading on the tube or in the bath, neither of which is yet pratical with a laptop. But primarily, purchasing the book is a way of acknowledging the contribution the authors have made to the software writing community.
Surveillance
Yesterday I spotted outside New Scotland Yard a lone protestor with a home-made (A4) placard sporting the message:
Well I think we can all agree that's a pretty serious accusation. But what exactly is a homophonic crime? Some examples...
As the author of this heinous piece I fully expect to be put away myself, for commiting pun crimes.
Anyway, it is strange that the Fulham constabularly don't investigate homophonic crimes, as they ought to be partcularly alert to homophones. After all, the supporters fanzine of the local football club is called "There's Only One F In Fulham".
Fulham Police won't investigate homophonic crime.
Well I think we can all agree that's a pretty serious accusation. But what exactly is a homophonic crime? Some examples...
- A negligent road maintenance department that let the tarmac melt in the summer heat could be charged with Highway Rubbery;
- People who insult the village priest ought to find themselves investigated for committing Offences Against the Parson;
- There are a number of jazz-influenced buskers on the tube who ought to be locked up as Sax Criminals;
- Several violent Scotsmen should be locked up under the Dangerous Dougs Act;
- Could I get away with one about Jordan and the Dangerous Dugs Act? Probably not. Still, two homophones for the price of one!
As the author of this heinous piece I fully expect to be put away myself, for commiting pun crimes.
Anyway, it is strange that the Fulham constabularly don't investigate homophonic crimes, as they ought to be partcularly alert to homophones. After all, the supporters fanzine of the local football club is called "There's Only One F In Fulham".
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Java "Not a Memory Hog" shock!
According to Xiaobin Lu on Java.net it is just the way the JRE maps the jar files in memory that makes Java look like it has a big footprint in (say) Task Manager. So they've rewritten the mapping in the latest build of Mustang. The really interesting thing is that the new mapping technique on Linux and Solaris works the way it always did on Windows and so saves 12-13% on real memory usage, as well as reducing the perceived usage. Java more efficient on Windows than on *nix - who'd have thunk it?
Friday, August 05, 2005
BCS MiniSPA: Refreshing and Invigorating
The BCS SPA group organised a one-day sampler of their SPA conference in London. Not being a member of the BCS I have never attended the actually conference (they are rather pricey). But this was free so it was not a hard sell to my bosses. Boy am I glad I went! It was a chance to immerse myself in ideas and issues that I just don't get the chance to ponder in normal working life.
Heuristics for improving Precision in UML Models
Mitchell presented (with James chipping in) a case study on the application of OCL to UML type diagrams. As I have only a shaky grasp of UML and know nothing about OCL I was surprised by how much of this talk I could follow. It was addressing a similar problems that are faced in Entity Relational modelling. If you have an optional One-To-Many relationship, what rule defines when there are no children? If you have an entity that has two different relationships to another entity is that one instances or two instances of the child? Always?
The rules are annotations to the Type diagram, consisting of a comment, which is the rule in natural language, and a OCL specification. Mitchell starts by formulating the rule in English. He leaves it for a while before converting it to OCL. It is important to understand the rule informally before expressing it formally, because that's the way the brain works. Finally he uses the result of the OCL formalisation was used to polish the natural language version of the rule so that it can be understood by the business experts.
This process is an iterative one, drilling down through the ambiguities in the data model. Frequently the exercise reveals contradictions or omissions in the business rules, which require the modeller to ask deep questions of the business experts, questions which sometimes they cannot answer. The presenters described some interesting customer reactions in reesponse to the process. The first said, "Your rules are different to mine. Yours are easier to understand." Another accused Mitchell of lying in their first interview, on the grounds that the questions he was asking were so perceptive he must have had prior experience of the business domain before starting work. A third customer has been so atagonised by software modellers asking difficult questions about their business that they have abandoned visual modelling and have returned to giving developers written specifications (probably in Word).
Architectural Evaluation for Fun and Profit!
The only presentation I attended by some one I was familiar with. Eoin Woods discussed two methods proposed for the SEI for evaluating a software architecture1. Actually it seems to me that this is a process for validating a proposed model to ensure that it satisfies all the requirements rather than a technique to compare different architectural approaches. Although I suppose there's no reason why we couldn't apply these techniques to the process of choosing an architecture.
The first technique, SAAM, is a walk through of the architecture by the various architects. It is focused on the functional requirements only. Its chief merit is that it is easy to understand and learn. The second technique ATAM is an evolution of SAAM. It is more complicated, as it prescribes two phases. However, in its favour is that it evaluates the architecture against all requirements, functional and non-functional. Also the second phase involves all the stakeholders not just the architects.
Definitely one to be filed under I wish I'd known that last year.
Creativity, the Path to Innovative Requirements
One way of looking at this presentation was that it was an extended advert for workshops run by Suzanne and James Robertson and Neil Maiden, but that would be grossly unfair. This was an engaging and enlightening discussion of how creative thought can be fostered, even compelled. The goal is to produce a set of requirements for the system that the customer doesn't yet know he wants. In this regard, Maiden sees the requirements gathering process as being the start of the design phase as much as the end of the analysis phase. Controversial stuff.
The working definition of creativity is thinking that is both novel and useful. People are very good at describing the constraints on a system. The key to creativity is to get them to think about how the system could work if those constraints no longer applied.
Lots of thought and preparation goes into these workshops. They need to generate an atmosphere of fun, freedom and safety, and yet must remain focussed on the goal. So the planning includes not just a deep understanding of the problem but choosing music, games and talks from experts in analogous fields to relax the particpants and spark ideas. The faciltators must keep the workshops running to a rigourous timescale. So it's quite hard work.
One common thought from developers on allowing their users' imaginations to run wild when it comes to requirements will be that the users will end up asking for the moon on a stick. Maiden and co have a radical suggestion that keeps the requirements within the bounds of the possible: the participants in the workshops represent all the stakeholders, including the developers.
The meeting ended with an invitation to nominate the most surprising thing we had learned. After some consideration I chose an insight from Neil Maiden's presentation:
This is a striking thought but also quite obvious once you think about it. The user has a problem (my job is to ensure planes don't crash into each other) and their requirement is the solution to that problem (the system will allow me to see the exact location of planes in my airspace). What was genuinely surprising was that some people hissed when I stood up and said this. Presumably because software developers tend to equate "solution" with "implementation". But if the requirements are feasible, coherent and validated, and developers have been involved in the specification of them, what's wrong with that?
1. Software architecture is the termininology used by the SEI, because they are sponsored by the US DoD, who have different definitions of hardware! Software architecture includes hardware platform, operating system, etc. (back)
Heuristics for improving Precision in UML Models
Presented by Richard Mitchell and Rob James
Mitchell presented (with James chipping in) a case study on the application of OCL to UML type diagrams. As I have only a shaky grasp of UML and know nothing about OCL I was surprised by how much of this talk I could follow. It was addressing a similar problems that are faced in Entity Relational modelling. If you have an optional One-To-Many relationship, what rule defines when there are no children? If you have an entity that has two different relationships to another entity is that one instances or two instances of the child? Always?
Your brain is not a formal engine.
The rules are annotations to the Type diagram, consisting of a comment, which is the rule in natural language, and a OCL specification. Mitchell starts by formulating the rule in English. He leaves it for a while before converting it to OCL. It is important to understand the rule informally before expressing it formally, because that's the way the brain works. Finally he uses the result of the OCL formalisation was used to polish the natural language version of the rule so that it can be understood by the business experts.
This process is an iterative one, drilling down through the ambiguities in the data model. Frequently the exercise reveals contradictions or omissions in the business rules, which require the modeller to ask deep questions of the business experts, questions which sometimes they cannot answer. The presenters described some interesting customer reactions in reesponse to the process. The first said, "Your rules are different to mine. Yours are easier to understand." Another accused Mitchell of lying in their first interview, on the grounds that the questions he was asking were so perceptive he must have had prior experience of the business domain before starting work. A third customer has been so atagonised by software modellers asking difficult questions about their business that they have abandoned visual modelling and have returned to giving developers written specifications (probably in Word).
Architectural Evaluation for Fun and Profit!
Presented by Eoin Woods
The only presentation I attended by some one I was familiar with. Eoin Woods discussed two methods proposed for the SEI for evaluating a software architecture1. Actually it seems to me that this is a process for validating a proposed model to ensure that it satisfies all the requirements rather than a technique to compare different architectural approaches. Although I suppose there's no reason why we couldn't apply these techniques to the process of choosing an architecture.
Bubbles don't crash
The first technique, SAAM, is a walk through of the architecture by the various architects. It is focused on the functional requirements only. Its chief merit is that it is easy to understand and learn. The second technique ATAM is an evolution of SAAM. It is more complicated, as it prescribes two phases. However, in its favour is that it evaluates the architecture against all requirements, functional and non-functional. Also the second phase involves all the stakeholders not just the architects.
Definitely one to be filed under I wish I'd known that last year.
Creativity, the Path to Innovative Requirements
Presented by Neil Maiden
One way of looking at this presentation was that it was an extended advert for workshops run by Suzanne and James Robertson and Neil Maiden, but that would be grossly unfair. This was an engaging and enlightening discussion of how creative thought can be fostered, even compelled. The goal is to produce a set of requirements for the system that the customer doesn't yet know he wants. In this regard, Maiden sees the requirements gathering process as being the start of the design phase as much as the end of the analysis phase. Controversial stuff.
Creativity is not unstructured thinking.
The working definition of creativity is thinking that is both novel and useful. People are very good at describing the constraints on a system. The key to creativity is to get them to think about how the system could work if those constraints no longer applied.
Lots of thought and preparation goes into these workshops. They need to generate an atmosphere of fun, freedom and safety, and yet must remain focussed on the goal. So the planning includes not just a deep understanding of the problem but choosing music, games and talks from experts in analogous fields to relax the particpants and spark ideas. The faciltators must keep the workshops running to a rigourous timescale. So it's quite hard work.
One common thought from developers on allowing their users' imaginations to run wild when it comes to requirements will be that the users will end up asking for the moon on a stick. Maiden and co have a radical suggestion that keeps the requirements within the bounds of the possible: the participants in the workshops represent all the stakeholders, including the developers.
Wrap up: The reflective practitioner
The meeting ended with an invitation to nominate the most surprising thing we had learned. After some consideration I chose an insight from Neil Maiden's presentation:
A requirement is a solution.
This is a striking thought but also quite obvious once you think about it. The user has a problem (my job is to ensure planes don't crash into each other) and their requirement is the solution to that problem (the system will allow me to see the exact location of planes in my airspace). What was genuinely surprising was that some people hissed when I stood up and said this. Presumably because software developers tend to equate "solution" with "implementation". But if the requirements are feasible, coherent and validated, and developers have been involved in the specification of them, what's wrong with that?
Thursday, August 04, 2005
What I learnt about Oracle today
SQL> SELECT id, some_date
2 FROM tst1
3 ORDER BY some_date
4 /
ID SOME_DATE
---------- ---------
8 03-JAN-05
10 10-FEB-05
1 18-FEB-05
2 24-FEB-05
6 26-FEB-05
9 01-MAY-05
7 20-MAY-05
4 29-MAY-05
3 18-JUN-05
5 09-JUL-05
10 rows selected.
SQL> SELECT id, to_char(some_date, 'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS') AS some_date
2 FROM tst1
3 ORDER BY some_date
4 /
ID SOME_DATE
---------- --------------------
9 01-MAY-2005 09:58:09
8 03-JAN-2005 11:00:33
5 09-JUL-2005 21:01:44
10 10-FEB-2005 03:19:58
1 18-FEB-2005 00:46:04
3 18-JUN-2005 03:06:05
7 20-MAY-2005 08:20:05
2 24-FEB-2005 08:17:43
6 26-FEB-2005 07:12:51
4 29-MAY-2005 14:21:38
10 rows selected.
SQL> SELECT id, to_char(some_date, 'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS') AS the_date
2 FROM tst1
3 ORDER BY some_date
4 /
ID THE_DATE
---------- --------------------
8 03-JAN-2005 11:00:33
10 10-FEB-2005 03:19:58
1 18-FEB-2005 00:46:04
2 24-FEB-2005 08:17:43
6 26-FEB-2005 07:12:51
9 01-MAY-2005 09:58:09
7 20-MAY-2005 08:20:05
4 29-MAY-2005 14:21:38
3 18-JUN-2005 03:06:05
5 09-JUL-2005 21:01:44
10 rows selected.
SQL>
Hmmm....
Oracle's SELECT statements support column aliases in the ORDER BY clause. Now when did that happen? Actually Oracle's been doing so for years, since at least 8i. It's one of those things I feel a fool for not knowing about, but at the same time I'm glad there's still things about even very basic Oracle that I have yet to learn.
A piece of seventeenth Taoist wisdom, cited in The DailyZen Journal:
If people want to do the finest thing in the world, nothing compares to learning. If they want to be the best of learners, nothing compares to learning the Way.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Meanwhile, back at the Strategy Boutique
I see the government's procurement body is now called OGCbuying.solutions (sic). Such a dense melding of typographical tricksiness and trendy jargon, it's virtually a black hole of faddishness. And it probably only cost the taxpayer a couple of million in consultancy and rebranding costs.
However, the home page shows that while the OGC call-off catalogue is called Catalist the bespoke procurement brand (sic, sic) is the rather boring Managed Services. That's not really trying. How about a competition to come up with something zappier, more Zeitgeist-y? My suggestion is OutSauce.
However, the home page shows that while the OGC call-off catalogue is called Catalist the bespoke procurement brand (sic, sic) is the rather boring Managed Services. That's not really trying. How about a competition to come up with something zappier, more Zeitgeist-y? My suggestion is OutSauce.
Monday, August 01, 2005
Instant surrealism
I googled an e-mail domain this morning to see where an OTN forum poster was (literally) coming from. When I found it was a Chinese web site I couldn't resist clicking on the Translate This Page option. It's obviously an entertainment site and a description of a movie (or several movies???) generated this cool surrealist poem:
Neat icy cold one summer with beautiful woman bright one both eyes
- < Comedian clown wonderful soldier > wears the mask ??
- " Love map " three metropolises foreign lands love
- " Fords grain language " the militarism reactionary gang history
- < Sentiment confuses forbidden fruit > the Russian desire metropolis
- " Thirstily strives for ?? " and likes to the ethyl alcohol relying on
- " The Paris person " the amphoteric war initiation disputes
- " Paris sweetheart, New York sofa " fate
- " Milk price " lover and cows
- " Red apricot leaves wall " the classical family ethics piece
Andre Breton, you should be living now!
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