Historians have described the period following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire (400 to 1400 AD) as the “Dark Ages.” Existing knowledge was lost and society regressed to a more primitive organization and technology.

In IT, we do not learn from history. We routinely throw away existing knowledge to start over, constantly emerging from each dark age only to enter a new one.

I was just reminded of this unfortunate tendency when I opened The Economist on my iPad. I used to read the magazine in traditional form on dead trees (aka paper) but moved to their iPad app to get my magazine on the publication date and not two days later. Their first iPad app reproduced the magazine layout with several narrow columns of text, re-using centuries of typographical knowledge. But in the new version, the clueless digital natives have decided to make the text one wide column with the lines way too close together, which makes it much harder to read.

Next time you get the bright idea to change something that has worked well (a page layout, a business process, or an IT framework), reflect on whether the change will really make it easier for the system to fulfill its promise.

TL;DR: Yes.

Developers often ask me which language or tool they should use or learn. I have definite opinions on good and bad tools for various tasks, but the most important tip is to continue learning new technologies. This gives you joy in your life, prevents burnout, and provides a platform when the time comes to move on from your current technology.

For your day job, you want a language that is stable or increasing. It doesn’t matter if it is outside the top ten in rankings like the TIOBE index. For example, Oracle’s proprietary PL/SQL database language has been hovering around place number 20 for many years, and PL/SQL programmers are not likely to be out of a job anytime soon.

But you still need to continually add to your skill set. People who keep doing the same thing lose the joy and wonder of making something work, which is often what got them started in IT in the first place. To prevent burnout, carve out time to work on something new every week.

Don’t expect your employer to give you this time. In some organizations, you might be able to use allocated training time to learn something on your own, but even Google’s famous “20% time” for side projects is 20% on top of the 100% you already work.

You should be grateful you have the privilege to work in IT. To keep that privilege, you should invest time in yourself and your life.

This is an excerpt from the monthly Spiritual Programmer newsletter. Don’t miss the next issue, sign up here. 

Oracle has released the latest quarterly critical patch update (CPU). The database gets off lightly this time with two moderate severity vulnerabilities in SQL*Plus and the Oracle JVM. On the other hand, Oracle Secure Backup is not very secure with a bug that can be remotely exploited without authentication. Bad.

The Fusion Middleware stack gets 31 fixes, of which 20 are in the bad group of remotely exploitable without authentication. There is a lot of WebCenter stuff as well as some WebLogic and little Oracle Service Bus. Read the notes and update your environments.

Almost all of the Oracle applications (E-Business Suite, Siebel, J.D. Edwards) are also vulnerable, many through the critical Apache Struts 2 vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638). Oracle has fixed everything related to this Struts 2 bug in this CPU, but if you are running anything else based on Struts 2, make sure you update to a non-vulnerable version.

In a famous Monty Python sketch, John Cleese tries to return a dead parrot to the shopkeeper where he bought it. However, the shopkeeper is impervious to reason and claims the clearly dead parrot is still alive.

I just had a “dead parrot” moment with iTunes support. Their support used to be excellent, but the humans have now been replaced by imbecilic chatbots. This is a serious miscalculation.

What really annoys customers is when they are not listened to, and not listening is the one core competency of today’s chatbots. Being served platitudes about “we understand you are unhappy” doesn’t make me happier…

If you are considering chatbots for some aspect of your operation, make sure to offer an option for the customer to give feedback. Apple doesn’t, and Tim Cook probably thinks their support is brilliant. It isn’t.

Developers hate it when pesky users raise bug reports against their wonderful creations. I’m a developer myself and have sometimes found myself mystified why a specific piece of code didn’t work in a specific case.

But don’t ever let developers tell the users that the code works fine, and the problem must be with the user.

I communicate with a lot of people and have been using Contactually to keep a central record of all my contacts. One nice feature of this tool is that it can use IMAP to connect to my mailbox to include the emails I’ve sent in the overview. For some reason, this IMAP functionality stopped working, and after some back-and-forth with support, I was told that the problem was with my password.

This is a rather disingenuous excuse, as the software already gives me an error if I enter an invalid password. It reminds me of the Beavis and Butthead episode called “Customers Suck“, where the two idiots don’t want to serve customers and can’t even be bothered to come up with a good excuse.

However, the poor customer service employee had no choice but to pass this lame attempt at blame-shifting to me. I had to cancel the service.

Make sure you are not allowing your developers to shrink their responsibilities and ruin your reputation with customers internal and external.

Medicins Sans Frontieres have an annual collection here in Denmark, and I was one of the volunteers going house-to-house to collect donations.

I experienced quite a few people who didn’t have cash but still wanted to contribute. This is in alignment with recent surveys who show 21 percent of Europeans rarely use cash.

However, the belief that the cashless society will be a boon is utter techno-arrogance. It takes the average user approx 5 seconds to drop a few coins into my collection jar, and 10 seconds to fold a bank note and insert it. But nobody managed to complete an SMS transfer or mobile payment in less than 30 seconds.

It might be in the interest of shops, banks, and the tax collector to get rid of cash. But does it justify wasting 4,000 years of time globally every day? Consider the total cost to everyone in money, time and effort before you add technology to a process.

Oracle rose to database dominance by making their software freely available. Anybody can download a $100K+ enterprise edition database and use it for personal learning as long as he likes.

The Oracle Cloud offerings, on the other hand, are strictly limited. You need to provide both a mobile phone number and a credit card number in order to get a miserly 30-day trial. Once you’ve spent your 30 days, you’ve used the one chance you get in this lifetime to learn Oracle’s 50+ cloud offerings.

Contrast this with the approach taken by Amazon: A free tier without time limitation, and a generous 12-month trial for many of the other services. They took a page from Oracle’s playbook, offered free access and became dominant in the cloud space.

Oracle defends their stinginess by saying that it’s too expensive for them to offer free trials. And apparently, they believe they don’t need to offer good trials because their cloud is faster and cheaper.

Unfortunately, the ability of Larry Ellison to distort reality is limited. Oracle has a negligible market share in IaaS and PaaS and since they won’t invest a smidgen of their $60 billion cash hoard in better trials, they are likely to remain a bit player in this space.

I’ve used my own phone number and credit card, and my wife’s phone number and credit card, so I’m now out of options for learning more about the Oracle cloud. But I’m learning AWS.

This is a post from the OraToolWatch newsletter. Don’t miss the next one, sign up. 

40 years ago, Fred Brooks told us in his book The Mythical Man-Month why full outsourcing couldn’t work. Since outsourcing was rare and difficult back then, nobody took note. Today, advances in communications and technology make outsourcing much easier. That doesn’t mean it will work.

The reason is that IT work is not uniform. There are some easy tasks (rapidly getting automated) and some hard tasks that take expertise and judgment. And most organizations are outsourcing their work to regions where IT professionals haven’t had the time yet to develop expertise and judgment.

In a mature IT market, a wide range of skills exists, from basic to very advanced. As you need more advanced skills, the cost goes up, because there are fewer IT professionals with the requisite number of years of learning and experience.

In a new IT market, you can get basic competency cheaper. But because most IT professionals in these markets are relatively inexperienced, advanced skills are very rare, very expensive, and might not even exist.

The outsourcing fallacy is to think that you can move an entire, complex IT operation offshore. You can save money on moving simple tasks to regions with lots of competent but inexperienced IT people. But advanced skills won’t be available. So unless you can very cleanly separate simple tasks from advanced tasks, the communication overhead necessary to ensure that the right people get the right task will eat up any saving.

Think you can save money by outsourcing? Maybe you can. But many IT organizations have found they couldn’t. Get in touch if you need help figuring out the right level of outsourcing for your tasks and your organization.

Lots of programmers insist on working late. That’s a bad idea. For every one time a programmer reaches “flow” state and effortlessly produce reams of brilliant code late at night, there are a hundred inefficient programming sessions with low productivity and high error rates.

In most organizations, it is a near certainty that you will be spending most of your day doing something other than what you had planned. Most solutions involve company culture, managers, scrum masters, and colleagues. But there is one solution that is completely within your control: Show up early and complete one important task.

If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.
Mark Twain

If you are a night owl like me, that might be a significant change to your life. But it pays off handsomely in more happiness and less stress. Stress is caused by a feeling that you are not in control of your situation; starting early and actually getting a task of your own choosing done each day defeats this feeling.

Try starting work two hours earlier than everybody else for two weeks and see how much more you get done.

In cloud vendor rankings, Oracle is often found somewhere in the pack of “other cloud providers,” way behind Amazon, Microsoft and Google. But on their home turf, the database, Oracle is moving towards its natural leadership position. In the latest Forrester Wave™ for Database-As-A-Service, Oracle is right behind AWS and Microsoft in the Leaders section.

Source: The Forrester Wave™Database-As-A-Service Q2 ’17

Looking at Forrester’s evaluation criteria, it is possible to argue that the position should have been even higher. It is not obvious why Oracle should get a lowly 1.6 score for Architecture, nor why they should only be rated 4.2 again AWS’ perfect 5.0 for security.

Licensing is always part of the decision when discussing Oracle software, and there is a big difference between running Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

• With PaaS, the database license is included. This means you don’t buy an expensive database license up front, and can simply terminate your PaaS contract if you don’t need the database anymore.
• With IaaS,  whether from Oracle or one of the other two approved vendors  (Amazon and Microsoft), you will have to bring your own Oracle license.

For new development using an Oracle database, the flexible licensing means you should use Oracle PaaS if at all possible.

For existing Oracle installations, it might make sense to move from your existing on-premise hardware into the cloud if you are faced with buying new hardware. Note that some features are only available on Oracle’s IaaS cloud – for example, you can’t run Oracle RAC on Amazon or Microsoft.

Many of my customers are still running venerable Oracle Forms applications that they have no intention of retiring or replacing. So when Oracle announced in support note 2310266.1 that “Oracle has no current plans to certify or support Java 9 with any version of Oracle Forms,” they were understandably worried.

From Oracle’s standpoint, it makes sense not to spend resources certifying an end-of-life product like Oracle Forms with every Java version. Especially since Java 9 will run under the new release model with a new version every six months.

This should not be a problem for Forms customers. Oracle does promise to continue to make Java 8 updates available to customers with support contracts for Forms or products depending on Forms (like E-Business Suite). Our Forms applications will anyway have to be updated to Forms 12c now that browser support for Java applets is running out, and that allows us to run the Forms applet through Java Web Start. We should then be able to use the tag in our JNLP file to point to the right Java, even if the workstation also has Java 9.

Long term, I expect either that  Forms will be supported on the first Java 9 Long Term Support release in September 2018, or that the Forms applet will become a complete executable using the Java 9 jlink feature.

So don’t worry, you can still run Oracle Forms even if the rest of the world moves to Java 9.

This post originally appeared in the Oracle Tool Watch newsletter. If you sign up this week, you will receive a free copy of my whitepaper “What Oracle is Doing Wrong (and Right) in the Cloud” as well as more interesting tips to keep you up to date with what’s happening in the Oracle community.

Larry Ellison announced the self-patching database at OpenWorld this year. Until we get to that point, professional DBAs and system administrators need to keep their Oracle environments secure.

Right now, that means at least installing the patches Oracle provides quarterly in the Critical Patch Updates (CPUs). The latest from October 2017 is one of the scariest I have seen for a while. Out of a total of 251 issues, 156 can be remotely exploited without authentication. Everyone who is or can get behind your firewall can use them against you.

If you are running any of the following, you urgently need to install the October CPU:

• Oracle Database
• WebLogic Server
• SOA Suite
• WebCenter Content
• Oracle Access Manager
• GlassFish
• BI Publisher
• Oracle BPM
• MySQL
• VirtualBox

To nobody’s surprise, there are also newly discovered bugs in Java SE – 22 this time, of which 20 can be remotely exploited without authentication.

Most of the Oracle applications also have serious issues, including Oracle E-Business Suite, Hyperion, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel.

Stay safe. Patch your systems.

Don’t miss out on important information you need as an IT professional working with Oracle products. Sign up for the Oracle Tool Watch newsletter and get the free whitepaper “What Oracle is Doing Wrong (and Right) in the Cloud”

I’m often asked, “what does the future look like for an Oracle developer?” The answer is that the future for IT developers, in general, is bright, but the future for Oracle developers is more murky.

Most people who consider themselves Oracle developers are using a very specific part of the Oracle product line – typically SQL and PL/SQL  in the database, possibly supplemented with Forms, APEX, or ADF. Unfortunately, that’s not where the future lies.

PL/SQL is typically languishing somewhere around place 20 on the TIOBE programming language list, with a rating of around 1.4% of developers. That’s ahead of COBOL, but behind Visual Basic. The long-term trend is also not on your side, as Google Trends shows. 

Don’t consider yourself an Oracle developer. Consider yourself someone who uses IT to solve problems. And be open to learning something new.

This post originally appeared in the Oracle Tool Watch newsletter. Sign up to receive a free copy of my whitepaper “What Oracle is Doing Wrong (and Right) in the Cloud” (and more interesting tips to keep you up to date with what’s happening in the Oracle community).

I’m soon heading to Nürnberg for the Deutsche Oracle-Anwender Gruppe (DOAG) annual conference. I’m on the agenda with two presentations, both on Tuesday, Nov 21:

• “APEX, ADF, or ABCS? A real-life application built in 3 tools” in room Oslo at 8.30am
• “The Seven Ways of Building Oracle Applications” in room Hongkong at 2.00pm

I know from the conferences I am part of arranging how hard it is to put together a good program. A lot of thought goes into the selection, making conference programs good indicators of which tools are popular with real-life developers. The 2017 DOAG agenda looks like this:

We all know that APEX is a popular conference topic, and the DOAG conference is no exception. More surprising is the fact that Oracle Forms takes second place. There are a lot of Forms applications still running, and a lot of Forms developers. These people have nowhere to go at Oracle’s conferences, but fortunately, user groups are providing the Oracle Forms content developers are looking for.

It also seems the conference committee is not convinced about the Oracle mobile solutions – both Mobile Application Framework (MAF) and Mobile Application Accelerator (MAX) occur just once. And that is only because I have included them with one-seventh part of my presentation about the seven ways of building Oracle applications.

Please join your local Oracle user group and attend their events. That is another place to get the same straight talk on Oracle tools as you get from my emails. I hope to see you at DOAG 2017 in Nürnberg or at another conference somewhere.

This post originally appeared in the Oracle Tool Watch newsletter. Sign up to receive a free copy of my whitepaper “What Oracle is Doing Wrong (and Right) in the Cloud”. 

I was asked on Quora “I have been given a choice to work either in ADF or PLSQL. What should I choose?”

My answer is ADF, for many reasons:

1. The programming language in ADF applications is Java, which is the most popular programming language. That means whatever you learn is applicable for the rest of your career.
2. PL/SQL is only used in Oracle databases, meaning you will be building skills that will only be valuable in the subset of companies using the Oracle database seriously
3. ADF development is a sought-after specialty. Just google “Oracle ADF Developer” to see a list of open jobs.
4. There are many PL/SQL developers with 10+ years of experience, and the amount of PL/SQL work out there is declining. You’ll be competing with very capable and experienced PL/SQL programmers for this work.

I’m speaking at the German Oracle user group conference this week. This is one of the two big Oracle user group conferences in Europe and they have good technical content for Oracle developers. I’ve attended Forms, APEX, ADF and Oracle JET presentations, and it’s interesting to observe the differences between the communities.

• Oracle Forms developers are proud professionals who take their responsibility for keeping critical applications running very seriously
• Oracle APEX developers want to be cool and use every new technology with APEX (Docker, Alexa, etc). There is lots of hand-waving enthusiasm and an “open mic” show.
• Oracle ADF developers know they have selected the best tool and wonder why not everybody is using it
• There aren’t really any Oracle JET developers yet, but there is a lot of interest in learning this technology

To keep up to date with what’s happening in the Oracle world, sign up for my Oracle Tool Watch newsletter. You’ll also get my whitepaper “What Oracle is doing wrong (and right) in the cloud.” 

I was at the German Oracle user group conference in Nürnberg last week, and one interesting observation was that there was a lot of Forms-related content. The distribution of development topics looked like this:

One interesting feature presented by Oracle Forms product manager Michael Ferrante is the Forms Application Deployment Service (FADS). This functionality allows you to create a .FAR file (Forms Application Archive) with all the files you need for your entire Forms application, including FMB, configuration, SQL etc. With these complete packages, it becomes easier to distribute new versions of Forms applications.

There are still no signs of an Oracle Forms cloud service. For now, the only way to run Oracle Forms in the cloud is to buy some machine power in the form of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) instance. And if you are just buying machine power, Oracle is unlikely to be the cheapest provider. However, with FADS Oracle is one step closer to being able to offer such a service.

I also spoke with the people I know from AuraPlayer. They have produced some cute stickers that inspired the title of this post:

Their product creates REST web services from an existing Forms application and also offers testing and monitoring for Forms applications. This is a very promising approach – if you have a Forms application and are interested in modernizing it, send me an e-mail and let’s discuss if that’s right for you.

This post originally appeared in the Oracle Tool Watch newsletter. Sign up now to receive a free copy of my whitepaper “What Oracle is Doing Wrong (and Right) in the Cloud”. 

In my short DOAG video, I opined that the APEX community wants to be cool. Many APEX developers took umbrage at that.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be cool. But as Oracle developers, we must realize we start at minus 10 on the coolness scale.

Oracle has never been a first mover in development tools, and have never made any serious effort to promote their tools. That’s a major reason why Oracle is seen as uncool in the wider developer community.

However, using cool tools is beside the point. Being an Oracle developer is about solving a real business problem in the fastest possible way. Historically, we used Oracle Forms for that. Today, many use APEX. Some use Oracle ADF, and some are starting to use Oracle JET.

What I like about the Oracle community is the focus on solving real problems, even with “uncool” tools. And that is cool.

This post originally appeared in the Oracle Tool Watch newsletter. Sign up to receive a free copy of my whitepaper “What Oracle is Doing Wrong (and Right) in the Cloud“.

For a long time, APEX was Oracle’s Excel-killer. With the ability to upload a CSV file and create a matching table and then build an application on top of that, this was the easiest way to convert a spreadsheet into a secure multi-user application.

Visual Builder Cloud Service (VBCS) has now appeared as a serious challenger, offering some improvements over the way APEX handes Excel files. For example, the December 2017 version of VBCS has the ability to import Excel files directly without having to turn them into CSV files first. Separate worksheets in the Excel files become separate business objects. During the import, you can also define reference relationship for lookup values. This allows you to upload an Excel file with one master worksheet and a number of value lists as separate sheets, and produce a business object with all lookups in one operation.

(image from Oracle VBCS documentation)

VBCS is one of Oracle’s cloud-native applications, so it only runs in the cloud and requires a subscription. But if that is not a problem for you, I encourage you to take a look. If you are already using VBCS, I’d love to hear from you.

This post originally appeared in the Oracle Tool Watch newsletter. Don’t miss the next post, sign up and receive a free copy of my whitepaper “What Oracle is Doing Wrong (and Right) in the Cloud”. 

You can change your life on any day of the year. But for some reason, incrementing the year counter in the Gregorian calendar makes more people aware of this fact. So should you change your life as an Oracle professional in 2018?

If you are a DBA, the autonomous, self-driving database is not going to put you out of work in 2018. As as matter of fact, the Oracle Database 18c is not an Autonomous Database. Oracle has announced an Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud, but even that is still “Coming soon.” But do keep an eye on what this technology can do for you and your organization once it ships.

If you are a database (PL/SQL) programmer with more than a few years from retirement, you’ll need a new gig. Consulting companies are laying off PL/SQL developers and most Oracle shops have more PL/SQL developers than they know what to do with. In the short term, if you don’t know APEX, definitely learn. In the long term, learn something outside the Oracle ecosystem.

If you are a Java developer, you’re good. There are billions of lines of Java code that will need maintaining for the next several programmer lifespans.

And don’t forget to eat healthier, exercise more, drink less, and stop making unrealistic promises to yourself. Happy new year!

This post originally appeared in the Oracle Tool Watch newsletter. Sign up to receive a free copy of my whitepaper “What Oracle is Doing Wrong (and Right) in the Cloud“.