UKOUG Bloggers Meetup…

 

It was cool to meet up with everyone again. Some people were at OpenWorld, some I’ve not seen since this time last year, and others were new faces. It’s good to meet-and-geek. 🙂

The subject of my blog post regarding forums came up a number of times. It seems everyone is suffering in the same way. One suggestion was that we, as a community, should try to get rid of as many Oracle forums as possible and encourage people to use the OTN forums. Effectively creating a single point of reference. I’m going to give this one some thought. Some days I really like having my forum, other days it’s the a right royal pain. I guess if the bad is out-weighing the good, closing it is an option.

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

5 thoughts on “UKOUG Bloggers Meetup…”

  1. Fora go through life cycles too. I think the proliferation of fora has gotten out of hand,
    diluting it for everyone, but I think getting rid of as many Oracle forums as possible
    and encouraging OTN is a swing too far in the other direction. It is a good thing to have
    some difference of zeitgeist, some people prefer different types of online social environments,
    and even different posting formats, some people are at different levels of understanding.
    There is an argument to be made that some fora _should_ be restricted in who they let post
    (I used to really dislike the macho “prove you are good enough for this BBS” attitude in the
    olden days). Of course, anything officially sponsored by Oracle is going to have
    arms-length issues, even if the official policy is hands-off, if for no other reason than
    people will scream “cabal!”

    Even the most open forum will have people who feel left out for whatever reason, they
    should be able to go elsewhere – witness the migrations in and out of cdos and oracle-l over
    the years. Some competition between fora can be a good thing. Oracle is so huge and has
    so many people doing different things there really ought to be many fora, including some
    full of misinformation and overgeneralizations for the, um, imspeak generation. The
    important thing is, those who want to find good information, can. No single answer will
    work for everyone.

  2. If there is a mass migration to the OTN forums, I sure hope they figure out the performance issues and how to change email addresses. There are times during the day when the OTN forums are almost unusable because it takes minutes to load a page.

  3. OTN forums only?
    What next?
    We shall only say what Oracle wants?

    I can’t think of a better argument to have many forums open than ANY suggestion to “only do this or that” under the exclusive Oracle corp umbrella!

    But then again: that’s me and I’m the “recalcitrant”.
    Don’t give a hoot about that one either…

  4. I’m not cynical about it. I think it has some merits. If everyone were involved it would be like a single point of truth… With a few clashes of egos 🙂

    Cheers

    Tim…

  5. Would a single point of truth be a good thing? I don’t think you can get there given the
    dynamic underlayment.

    You have, among other things:

    Multiple versions of the database.
    Feature life cycles – some things start out really buggy, some are not even designed rationally,
    some mutate.
    Wide variation in user requirements.
    Wide variation in user capabilities and understanding.
    Disagreement among those who do understand.
    Bugs.
    Mysterious black box thingies.
    Madness of crowds.
    Insufficiently precise problem definitions.
    Communication discontinuities across languages and cultures.
    Lag time between when things are figured out and the knowledge is widely dispersed.
    Marketing and profit considerations when businesses are involved.

    It would be nice to have a SPOT, but that is only achieveable in little chunks of
    code for a limited time. There are just too many variables beyond that. It’s a
    fundamental limitation of the scientific method.

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