Quest launches Toad Data modeler

Quest have added Toad Data Modeler to their product set. They've given it the rather boring acronym TDM (try saying it aloud). As far as I can tell it is a separate product to TOAD rather than a module with the existing IDE. The licensing costs strike me as a little steep but I guess it's still only half the price of bog standard TOAD for Oracle itself. Under the hood it is CASE Studio, which Quest bought a while back.

Anyway, it supports both Entity Relationship Diagrams and Data Flow Diagrams. Which is actually jolly exciting: I can't remember the last time I drew a DFD but it was probably in 1999, the last time I worked under SSADM. As a possible replacement for Oracle Designer I think the biggest drawback is that it doesn't separate the logical and physical models: they're just two views we can toggle between. I don't know how many people actually maintain two separate models these days, but I would guess that the sort of people who care about data modeling are likely to be the sort of people who would want to keep the logical and physical models separate. And the rest of us will continue using Schemester or some other freeware. (There is going to be a freeware verson of TDM but it won't have all the features enabled; most notably it will lack reverse engineering).

Interpretation: TOAD stays one hop ahead of SQL Developer. Or two if you're one of those people hung up on the performance of your tools.

Update

I suppose I ought to make it clear that I haven't actually used TDM. I have had bad experiences when using a crippleware version of TOAD IDE. But maybe I will download the evaluation copy and see whether it cuts the mustard or cuts the cheese.

Niagara vs Intel: Round #1

Sun have just published a benchmark comparing the performance Oracle 10g on one of their CoolThreads servers against a four-way Xeon server running Linux. The benchmark is the iGEN-OLTP benchmark. This is significant: when I attended a Sun presentation on the new Niagara chips earlier this year CoolThreads was positioned for calculation intensive applications, web servers, etc. rather than data intensive applications.

The headline result?

When running the Oracle database 10g, the Sun Fire T2000 CoolThreads server outperformed an equivalent 4-
way Dell PowerEdge server equipped with the latest 64 bit Intel Xeon processors by over 3.5x, while
consuming 1.6x less power and occupying 50% of the data center space. It was able to do this while achieving
a 3x better price / performance ratio.

One interesting difference is that the PowerEdge install was Standard Edition (four CPUs) but the Sunfire had to have the Enterprise Edition, because the Niagara chip counts as eight CPUs. Of course, through the magic of Oracle licencing policy for Niagra chips we only pay two per processor licences. This means the price differential between running SE on PowerEdge and EE on SunFire is marginal ($65,000 and $80,000 respectively). Of course, if the application needed to use Enterprise Edition functionality the price of the PowerEdge installation would increase dramatically. As it is, the cost of the hardware represents only a quarter of the total cost in both cases.

So, an intriguing benchmark. If only because it offers sites one way to move up from Standard Edition to Enterprise Edition on the cheap.

India enforces a Blogspot blackout

The Indian government is blocking access to blog sites, apparently because terrorists use blogs to communicate. As somebody commented on Boing Boing,

Not only is this useless (because the terrorists can simply use proxies), it's akin to shutting off the country's telephone service because terrorists talk to each other through phones.

In the short term the blog-out is just incovenient for people. I helped one OTN forum user this morning by reproducing an entry from Scott Spendolini's blog (crucial to the success of their project apparently). But we cannot do this for everybody. The Boing Boing article includes a site with some workarounds. Unfortunately (like this blog) it's on Blogspot and so is useless to anybody whose ISP has already blocked their access.

In the long run, we can all agree the Mumbai bomb was horrific. Of course governments need to take measures to apprehend terrorists and prevent further carnage. The question the Indian government ought to be pondering is, will restricting access to the internet, by hobbling its tigerish software industry, end up doing more damage to the Indian economy, for no discernible return?

Update: 20-JUL-2006

According to Shivam Vij at Rediff this measure was actually aimed at suppressing individual sites which promote religious intolerance. The fact that it was applied wholesale to blog domains is due to a misunderstanding on the part of the ISPs. Consequently the blockade should be lifted soon. We shall see.

Preparing for Open World 2006

I am going to San Francisco this year, courtesy of OTN's complementary Open World passes for ACEs. Fortunately my Technical Director has agreed to authorise the expenses, which are coming out of a marketing bucket - so expect to see me in an LCMG polo shirt :) I'm joining Mark Rittman and Tim Hall in the Brit enclave in the King George Hotel, which sounds rather interesting. Apparently they do afternoon tea in the English manner. With luck this means BOP in a pot and not a teabag in a chipped mug.

However, I won't just be swanning around SF: I'm speaking too. OOW has accepted my abstract on developing PL/SQL with automated unit tests. To be honest I wasn't expecting this, as my submission was a last minute impulse. I had had some nice feedback from the presentation I did on utPLSQL at the UKOUG DE SIG last month, so I thought, what the heck. A good call, as it turns out. Apart from anything else, the best way to defuse co-workers' accusations of going on a jolly is a rejoinder of, "I'm presenting, actually".

I have mixed feelings about my third OOW. San Francisco is a cool place and I'm really looking forward to going back there again. It will also be nice to meet up with some of my fellow ACEs in meatspace rather than the forums. I hope the OTN area has a prime location this year. But the scale of the OOW2K6 enterprise is daunting. Indeed, 41,000 delegates is a scary prospect. There are towns smaller than that. It will be interesting to see how the facilities cope. Last year was bad enough. Between sessions the corridors of the Moscone centre were filled migrating geeks. The queue for Larry's keynote was already outside the building an hour before he was due to start talking. And that was a mere 29,000 delegates.

This year I foresee Soviet-era length queues for everything: Starbucks' coffee, internet access, the toilets. This is where jetlag gives us Europeans an edge: we're up and wanting to check our e-mail whilst the natives are still asleep. A good strategy for a successful conference will be to figure out where everybody is heading and go some place else. Avoid the queues by choosing minority-interest sessions. Face it, you're not going to get into any of Tom Kyte's presentations unless you take a sleeping bag and camp out in the foyer overnight. So come and hear me talk instead.

On becoming an ACE

Someone in the OTN forums wants to know whether they can nominate themselves to be an ACE. Quite recently one of my Dutch colleagues asked if I could advise them how to become an ACE. The answers to both questions is "No". I stumbled into ACE-hood. I was one of six charter winners of the OTN Community Awards (later rebadged as the ACE program) back in 2003. Five out of the original six people were nominated by OTN for participation in the OTN forums. Now there are many ways to become an ACE.

You could maintain a compelling blog like Mark Rittman. You could single-handedly create a tradition of best practice in PL/SQL programming like Steven Feuerstein. You could become the leading expert in installing Oracle on Linux like Werner Puschitz. You could run an excellent community website, give deep answers to questions on Oracle listservers and write a book on the Cost-Based Optimizer like Jonathan Lewis. Being an OCM didn't do Laurent Schneider any harm. Or, of course, you could just be as knowledgeable, dedicated and evangelical as Tom Kyte.

In that light, becoming an ACE for just answering questions in the OTN forums looks like the easy option. And it is. All that is required is patience with newbies, time to read and research questions, a basic level of writing ability and a willingness to engage across a variety of topics. Enthusiasm for good programming and administration is important. A sense of humour can be useful (but also dangerous: not everybody will get the joke). It also helps to know what you're talking about although I've never let this hold me back ;) For what it's worth I wrote on how to be a good guru some time ago.

In the end, you can't set out to become an ACE. It's something that happens to you along the way, a sign that somebody else has spotted your efforts and deemed them worthy of merit. Nor should you bother to try to become an ACE. If the activity is not meaningful to you irrespective of ACE-hood then you probably won't make the grade anyway. The perks are not that great (a complementary pass to Oracle Open World but meet your own expenses and that cool ACE logo whenever you post in the Forums). But the recognition is priceless. In this respect it's not unlike a janitor in the MoD being given the MBE for thirty-five years of service (i.e. cleaning toilets).

The bar has certainly been raised since I was nominated. If I look at some of the people who are now ACEs I think I must have walked into the wrong club. But I am an ACE too and I've got the sweatshirt to prove it.

Musings on seashells

Not C shells, seashells. The offline version of the Guardian is giving away wallcharts of flora and fauna and yesterday's was Seashells. Whilst reading it with my son I was struck by the peculiarity, indeed the suggestiveness, of some of the names given to seashells. There are the obviously sniggersome: knobbed whelk, dog cockle, winkle (even Fred found that funny). Then there are the obscure trades from the Victorian underworld: ocean quahog, queen scallop. We have insults from a Hardy novel: common piddock, thick tellin. Finally, the unpleasant medical conditions: warty venus, spiny helmet.

Any of you who think I'm making too much of this are invited to consider the Linnaean name for the grooved razor clam: solens vagina.

First sighting of 11g!

A colleague was showing me a Metalink note (#4463574.8) he was reading whilst trying to diagnose PLS-0123. The thing that grabbed me was that this bug was not reproducible in 11. This was my first sighting of a mention of version 11 of the Oracle database, albeit still qualified as future version.

To answer the burning question, yes it still has the G for Grid suffix. Although I suppose that may be subject to change under marketing pressures.

Has anybody seen an announcement of features for database 11g? I know there's been some stuff about Forms but not much else. Presumably there will be lots of under-the-hood tweaking for Fusion but what else?

Vale billg!

So Bill is reprioritising his life. He's swapping his failure to stem the tide of computer viruses for vaccination programmes against human ones.

Actually it is too easy to mock Gates's tenure at MicroSoft. Nobody makes that much money without getting a lot of things right. On the same day as Gates made this announcement Joel Spolsky publishes an article recalling his time managing the Excel team. In it he explains just what it was that made billg so good.

UKOUG DE SIG Report: Birmingham 13-JUN-2006

Well, the Development Engineering SIG has survived Birmingham once more. I must admit there was a point when it seemed cursed. I had two presentations penciled in for the June SIG since the beginning of the year but in the event neither speaker could make the date. Then at the last minute Zend couldn't provide us with a technical presenter so we had to pull their talk on PHP too. Still, on the day it went pretty well. Everybody who had booked turned up and we had a couple of walk-ins too.

The agenda was focused on the more traditional aspects of Oracle development. The morning kicked off with, er, me talking about Unit Testing Utplsql. This had been billed as a talk on QUTE, which I had chosen as a goad to spur me into learning this new tool. Alas, work and other commitments conspired to deprive me of sufficient time to do this properly and it didn't take me long to run into several problems with QUTE. So I had to fall back on Utplsql, which I know well and which also works. I was (shamefully) still polishing my demo code on the train up to Brum. Fortunately none of the delegates had seen my previous 2003 talk on this topic and none of them were using Utplsql either. Whilst this mean my presentation taught them something new it is vaguely depressing that in 2006 there is still such a low take-up of automated unit testing.

Next on the agenda was Kavitha Prakash from Oracle Support, who talked about tools for monitoring network traffic in web Forms applications. This was a neat introduction to an esoteric area. Kavitha is an old friend of the SIG and offered us a couple of topics; I chose this one because I think networks are an area most of us ought to know more about. I had hoped this would be interesting, at least in part, to people other than Forms programmers and I think it was. I certainly shall be downloading Ethereal and monitoring my own network traffic.

Filling the tricky slot between coffee and lunch was Alan Maxwell from Oracle Consulting, with a presentation on BPEL. Whilst this was I think the fourth or fifth time I have seen an Oracle employee do the Loans demo there were several interesting nuggets in Alan's talk. To start with Oracle are positioning BPEL away from just web services and more towards general workflow (one of the test cases Alan mentioned has no web elements at all). I was also taken by the notion of using BPEL in just parts of a process (say by adding new steps to an existing set of tasks). So we don't have to BPEL-ise an entire workflow in one step. Finally there were a couple of tantalising mentions of the Rules Engine; this is a topic I shall pursue in the future.

After lunch Duncan Mills, J2EE evangelist and SIG stalwart, presented some techniques for getting more out of ADF. Specifically this was targeted at people who know how to achieve a certain UI effect in Forms but are stymied when it comes to doing the same thing within JDeveloper. I know how that feels. Anyway Duncan's presentation demonstrated how far JDeveloper has come since the first version of BC4J which I used back in 2000. Most of the techniques Duncan showed involved taking the stuff generated by drag'n'drop wizards and making changes in the underlying XML files. So we still have to know a lot more about the ADF plumbing than we needed to know in Forms. On the flip side JDeveloper offers a lot flexibility than the 4GL black box.

What was nice was to talk to a couple of first-time delegates afterwards. They both seemed impressed with the SIG. Assembling the agendas for this SIG is a tricky task. We have such a wide constituency that it is hard to get the balance right between breadth and depth. We need to cover a range of tools and technologies but people won't turn up for a single talk out of the whole day. I think we pulled it off this time but I shall await the critique results with bated breath.

The walls of Butrint

Whilst on holiday in Corfu last week I took the opportunity to visit the site of Butrint in Albania. This is a world heritage site, being a city that's been repeatedly occupied and built on by the various cultures that invaded Albania between the seventh century BC and the fourteenth century AD.

As a whole the site itself is oddly unimpressive. Most of Butrint is still covered, so the site comprises a number of isolated ruins separated by woodland. This makes it hard to get a sense of the scale of the place unlike, say, Pompeii or Herculaneum. Still it is worth visting as some of the individual pieces of the site are very interesting indeed.


The original walls of Butrint 

This is part of the city walls built in the 4th century BC by fleeing Trojans (the gateways are far too small and narrow to allow the ingress of a giant wooden horse...) It is difficult to get a sense of scale from this photograph, but the wall is built of blocks of stone about 60cm wide. Each block is irregularly shaped to fit together sturdily.


Roman refactoring 

Now this is how some later conquerors - the Romans - rebuilt the broken city walls in the 2nd century AD. Initially they attempted to reassemble the walls using the original stone blocks but it was too difficult to fit the pieces together. However, the Romans had a technology that the earlier builds lacked: mortar. So they broke the blocks into smaller, more regularly shaped pieces and built the walls anew. The walls are still resisting the overturning moment almost two millenia later.

In other words, it is easier to build lasting structures out of small reusable components than out of large specialised chunks.

Spam: the French don't have a word for it

I received my first spam e-mail wholly in French. Diappointingly it wasn't for a classy French pr0n site, just a variant on the Nigerian 419 scam. I don't think this money belonged to a dictator but my French isn't up to establish just why they can't shift this 12m USD out of the Philippines.

Anyway, I was piqued into discovering the French word for spam. As you probably know the French are obsessive about the purity of their language. One of the tasks of L'Academie francaise is to invent French words to replace les anglicismes. For instance a Walkman is un balladeur . Obviously the L'Academie Francaise has been swamped by new technological terms, because an MP3 player is un balladeur MP3. And spam is just le spam. Not even le pate, although la patee might be more appropriate.

Agile again, again

The May BCS SPA had a presentation from Sean Hanley of Exoftware on Agile development. The presentation was called "The Story of a Story" and focused on the lifecycle of a feature within an Agile project. To be honest a lot of it was stuff I'd heard before. One of these days I'm going to work on an Agile project instead of just listening to other people talk about them.

What I did find interesting was automated acceptance testing. This provides a neat way of validating the delivered feature end-to-end. In particular, these tests exercise the intra-component dependencies. This is crucial when the units tests have been developed using mocked dependencies.

Also, Sean's teams use an Interaction Designer - an HCI expert - to come up with the screen designs. Apparently Java coders aren't too good at UI design. Obviously this breaks the idea that the entire codebase belongs to everybody. But then Sean stressed the need for pragmatism in the pursuit of delivering what the customer needs. Who knows, before long it might be acknowledged that most Java heads aren't too hot at databases either and we'll see the introduction of Persistence Designers.

Sean shared one potentially very useful project technique with us: I'm Bored. When a meeting has gone on too long, stand up, say "I'm bored" and leave. I think I may try that one sometime soon.

The other insight he had on the matter of why we need Agile project methods was this: how many professional gamblers do you know who would bet on the success of an IT project (using whatever metric of success you like)? The answer to that question is not dependent on how many professional gamblers you know.

Well, what is your software like?

Whilst clearing out my Inbox I stumbled across an notification of a recent article by Sean McGrath on software analogies. After discussing two earlier analogies (mathematics and language) he reveals his latest favoured metaphor: "Software is like concrete." Now ain't that the truth!

Oracle Data Vault is released

Actually released is putting it a little strongly. OTN has a page about Data Vault which includes some viewlets. There's no sign of when we will actually be able to get our grubby mitts on it.

Data Vault is a very interesting product which I have been waiting for since seeing a demo of it at OOW2K5SF. Its value proposition is answering two questions:

• How can I stop my DBA reading my sensitive data?
  
• How can I prove that I have stopped my DBA reading my sensitive data?
  

It does this by separating user creation and privilege settings, and the auditing of same, from regular DBA activity. Of course it is not foolproof but if properly implemented it is going to need a conspiracy of at least three people to break Data Vault. A regular database is vulnerable to a single rogue DBA.

There's no details about pricing but the fact that it is listed as a Security Option alongside Oracle Advanced Security and Oracle Label Security should give us a clue.

Fun with password verification

Prompted by a question in the OTN forums I have been having a little play around with the Password Verification functionality. It's quite easy: we just create a function under SYS and add it to the users' profile(s). Oracle provide a sample function that applies some standard rules.

SQL> @C:\oracle\ora92\rdbms\admin\utlpwdmg.sql

Function created.


Profile altered.

SQL> alter user a identified by a
  2  /
alter user a identified by a
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-28003: password verification for the specified password failed
ORA-20001: Password same as or similar to user


SQL> alter user a identified by b
  2  /
alter user a identified by b
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-28003: password verification for the specified password failed
ORA-20002: Password length less than 4


SQL> alter user a identified by abcd
  2  /
alter user a identified by abcd
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-28003: password verification for the specified password failed
ORA-20002: Password too simple


SQL> alter user a identified by a1b2
  2  /
alter user a identified by a1b2
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-28003: password verification for the specified password failed
ORA-20003: Password should contain at least one digit, one character and one punctuation


SQL> alter user a identified by a1b_
  2  /

User altered.

SQL> alter user a identified by a1b_
  2  /
alter user a identified by a1b_
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-28007: the password cannot be reused


SQL> 

So that's quite nice. But wait a minute, what about this:

SQL> alter user a identified by b1b_
  2  /

User altered.

SQL> 

Isn't there supposed to be some similarity checking? It is definitely there in the utlpwdmg.sql script. So why isn't it working? Turns out it does work but only when the user changes their own password. By the way, notice the REPLACE syntax we need now that we have enabled the PASSWORD_VERIFY_FUNCTION.

SQL> conn a/b1b_
Connected.
SQL> alter user a identified by b2b_ replace b1b_
  2  /
alter user a identified by b2b_ replace b1b_
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-28003: password verification for the specified password failed
ORA-20004: Password should differ by at least 3 characters


SQL> 

This part of the checking doesn't work for SYS or any other user with the ALTER USER privilege. There's some helpful in Metalink note #114930.1 which explains Oracle's password management policy. Amongst other things the note says that:

"Oracle recommends that you do not change passwords using the ALTER USER statement because it does not fully support the password verification function."

Apparently we should use the SQL*Plus PASSWORD command or make explicit calls to OCIPasswordChange() to change passwords instead. But apart from the fact that SYS can bypass some of the similarity checking I'm not sure what the differences are. For normal users I think ALTER USER with the REPLACE clause remains a valid option (although using SQL*Plus PASSWORD is probably friendlier).

Object Monkey RIP???

So Jason Gorman seems finally to have pulled the plug on the ObjectMonkey website. True, lately it had turned into a potty-mouthed Private Eye wannabe, with the recent stuff being particularly virulent. Indeed Jason seemed a bit sheepish when I pegged him as Mr ObjectMonkey at the BCS Mini-SPA last year. Nevertheless some of the older material was refreshingly frank and insightful into the realities of software engineering and the project lifecycle, as well as being laugh-out-loud funny. It's like reading an DevX column written by Roger Mellie.

One essay in particular, "The Emperor's New Code", contained a very useful list of advice for a business project manager who needs to make a success of an IT project. Unfortunately the advice is headed Don't be a sh*thead. As a consultant I couldn't give that to a client: they won't read the advice, they'd just think, "He's calling me a sh*thead!". That's the problem with swearing. It is big and it is clever, and a well-timed expletive can be funny. But many people will grep out everything except the cusswords. It's all very well saying, as the Sub-Genius motto has it, "F**k 'em if they can't take a joke" but sometimes it's just not worth it. We end up alienating the people we most need to reach.

Alas, all this, the insights and the profanity, is now 404. Still, unlike Ozymandias, Jason Gorman has left behind more than a few broken links. Thank you Google cache!

Big Trouble In Little Kyoto

The Register has some interesting analysis of the slanging match that has developed between Larry Ellison and Red Hat chief executive Matthew Szulik sparked by the latter's purchase of JBoss.

"Why should [Oracle] buy an operating system when it can rely on partners like Red Hat and Novell to take responsibility for R&D of the distro themselves?

The only possible justification is if Oracle feels that by owning the operating system, it can also "own" a growing number of open source software developers. These developers can then help drive integration between the distro and Oracle's applications. Owning the operating system would certainly confirm the view Oracle is working towards an open- and closed-source stack that is certified to work together."

Of course, putting out a Linux distro means Oracle will be able to position itself in the same space as Microsoft operates, running MS applications on an MS operating system. Certainly Oracle licences look a lot cheaper when we don't have to pay for the OS licence too.

Incidentally, I see Szulik is claiming Oracle is like the old giants of the American automotive industry and that open source software companies are going to do to Oracle what Japanese car manufacturers did to General Motors in the seventies. The problem with such an analysis is that it misunderstands the nature of those Japanese companies. Really those companies were merely the automobile manufacturing arm of giant combines. These keiretsu were derived from the old samurai zaibatsus and each owned a bank, a ship builder, an electronics company, a white goods manufacturer, etc. Such ownership patterns are forbidden by US anti-trust laws but they gave the Japanese a competitive edge: difficulties in the car market could be offset by boom times in shipbuilding.

So really, Oracle producing its own Linux distro is much closer to the Japanese model than it might seem at first. And I bet Ellison, the daimyo connecting primally to his running water and cut unfinished wood, knows it.

Share and enjoy: online participation

What is it about online communities? The internet was spawned a plethora of community types - lists, forums, message boards, blogs, MMORPGs, open source software - in which individuals contribute their time and knowledge to help others in their community. Yet the stereotypical internet geek is a surly, uncommunicative individual with poor hygiene practices and no human friends. So how come we're such a social bunch?

These thoughts were prompted by an online questionnaire about online participation which was posted by an IS Masters student. If you're reading this then you ought to participate by taking his survey. That would be in the spirit of his thesis, which is about the relationship between social capital and knowledge sharing in virtual communities. That is, why people share in online communities when there's no reward.

First let's examine that assumption about no reward. For some people there is an indirect pecuniary reward for their online participation. I'm sure I wasn't the only person who was motivated to buy Tom Kyte's Expert One-on-One because of the AskTom site. Not just because the site acts as an advertisement for the quality of the book but because I felt beholden to Tom because I had got useful advice from the site. Jonathan Lewis says in his DBAZine podcast that his profile within the Oracle community (due to his activism with the UKOUG as well as his website) does help him get work as a contractor. Mark Rittman's blogging won him the Oracle Magazine ACE of the Year 2005 award, which has rewards (in kind). And I'm sure I'm not the only person who's been approached by headhunters because they've come across my spoor here or in the forums.

However, it is obvious that these rewards are trivial compared to the time we all in our various ways spend in the online communities (certainly compared to our hourly rates in the day job). Furthermore most people who contribute in the various forums, lists and blogs are not authors or ACEs. So why do we do it? Everybody's reasons will be different or at least differently prioritised but here are my reasons.

Firstly, my participation, in the forums and this blog, helps me organise my thoughts. Writing things down is a useful discipline. That's why I think people who dash off blog entries casually, as they would an e-mail, are missing a trick. It's one thing to be the first with a hot scoop, another thing to present an insight into some aspect of database programming or architecture in a way that's interesting and useful to others.

Secondly, presenting information in public is a good way to get our own misunderstandings corrected and our assumptions debunked. Ideally we do this ourselves by cobbling together a test case before posting . But if not someone else will point out our bloomers. Over the years I am getting better at not asserting things that I have not tested for myself but I still occasionally slip. And then the vultures swoop.

Thirdly, questions in the forums throw up problems from out of left field. Investigating those issues can teach us new techniques or fresh understandings in areas that our work has not yet taken to. This can make us more effective in our jobs. Or more likely it just appeals to our geeky need to know.

So far this is all about me. Well, it is a blog ;) But, what about the "community"? Doesn't that matter ? Of course it is important. To a large extent our existence as individuals is defined by our interactions with other people. Game Theory teaches us that in order to interact successfully we have to approach other with a presumption of trust people and a preparedness to give openly. In return we can expect gratitude and future co-operation. That's the only way any society can work. So perhaps we contribute to ensure there is a still an active community for when we need to ask for help, even if that means answering many more questions than we pose ourselves.

I think there's more to it than just the strictures of mutual grooming and the Prisoner's Dilemma. There is a warm sense of camaraderie among the regulars in any of these arenas. Interestingly this is often reinforced by communal activities in meatspace - drinking whisky around the old oak table, Oracle-L dinners during the Hotsos symposium, Oracle bloggers' dinners at various conferences.

Finally it's fair to say that online communities are not perfect. It's very easy to lose one's rag when interacting via e-mail. And - especially when the participants don't share a common first language - it's common for insults to be perceived when none was intended. We've had to invent new words to describe anti-social activity in cyberspace. Just recently a MMORPG called Roma Victor introduced virtual crucifixion to punish cheating players. And it is possible to overshare.

In conclusion ... Well, let's close the circle of online participation: start a blog and write your own conclusion!

SQL Developer makes Daily WTF

A few weeks into production and already making its mark in the wider software engineering community. Kris and his team must be so proud.

Mind you, it is a sign of the relative merits of SQL Developer as a tool that the only thing they can find to mock is the code generated by the DDL wizard. As several of the commenters say, most generated code is not the prettiest. Still the code as shown is rather revolting. You wouldn't want to work with anyone who learnt how to program PL/SQL by studying this stuff.

Read the whole thread here.

Red Hat buys JBoss

In this press release Red Hat announces that it has bought JBoss for $350m, although only 40% of that is cash. There's another $70m promised, "subject to the achievement of certain future performance metrics".

Well that's one Larry can scratch off the shopping list. If it's true that Oracle were offering $500m for JBoss I wonder why Marc Fleury turned that down but accepted Red Hat's much lower offer a few weeks later.

Update

The Register, diligent as ever, has uncovered a cached version of blog post in which Marc Fleury says what he read thinks, or at least thought, about Red Hat.