IT Entering the Dark Ages (Again)
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...
View ArticleDo You Need to Learn a New Technology?
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...
View ArticleOracle Critical Patch Update
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...
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Why I Now Hate Apple (Hint: Chatbots)
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...
View ArticleDon’t Let Developers Ruin Your Reputation
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...
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Cash is King
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...
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Oracle Cloud Strategy Fail
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...
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Why Outsourcing Doesn’t Work
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...
View ArticleWhy working at night doesn’t work
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...
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Oracle a Top-Three Cloud Provider
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...
View ArticleOracle Forms won’t run on Java 9 – now what?
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...
View ArticleScary Oracle security issues – patch now!
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...
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The Future of the Oracle Developer
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....
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Which Oracle tools are popular?
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...
View ArticleShould I work with ADF or PLSQL?
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: The programming language in ADF applications is Java, which...
View ArticleWhat Oracle developers think
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...
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Oracle Forms is Not Extinct
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...
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How cool is Oracle?
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...
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The new Excel-killer from Oracle
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...
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Do you need to learn something new in 2018?
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...
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