#ThanksOTN | The ORACLE-BASE Blog

ODC Appreciation Day 2017 (#ThanksODC)

Update: You may have noticed the name change. 🙂

After last year’s successful OTN Appreciation Day it only seems fitting to do it again this year. Since Oracle Technology Network (OTN) has now been renamed to Oracle Developer Community (ODC) there is a name change for the event this year, but the idea is the same. You can read why I decided to do this in last year’s announcement post.

The “EOUC Database ACES Share Their Favorite Database Things” sessions at Oracle OpenWorld have proved really popular and this allows everyone else to get in on the act. The “rules” are pretty much the same as last year…

The blog post title should be “ODC Appreciation Day : <insert-feature-name-here>“.
It can be a feature related to any Oracle product, not just database.
The blog post content should be short, focusing more on why you like the feature, rather than technical content. This makes it more accessible for new people to join in. If you’ve written in detail about that feature before, then link to that post and/or the docs from your blog post.
Tweet out the blog post using the hashtag #ThanksODC. If you have enough room, you might want to include #ThanksOTN as well for the sake of backwards compatibility. 🙂
We should all publish on the same day so we generate a buzz. Last year loads of people were on twitter retweeting, making it even bigger. The community is spread around the world, so the posts will be released over a 24 hour period. The day of the event will be Tuesday 1oth October. That gives people enough time to put something together, especially first-timers. Keep an eye on the date in case it has to change to avoid public holidays, like last year. 🙂
It really doesn’t matter if you write about the same feature as someone else. It’s interesting hearing different perspectives.
Oracle employees are welcome to join in. I’m happy for you to post about a feature of your product you think adds value, but please don’t just do a sales pitch for your product. 🙂
You are not allowed to call me a kiss-ass, then subsequently join in. 🙂

Like last year, it would be really nice if we could get a bunch of first-timers involved, but it’s also an opportunity to see some returning champions! 🙂

The day after the event I will put out a blog post with links to all the blog posts from the event.

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Appreciation Day : Summary

Yesterday was the OTN Appreciation Day. The plan was to mobilise the Oracle community to say #ThanksOTN for everything Oracle Technology Network (OTN) have done for the Oracle community over the years. You can obviously search on Twitter for #ThanksOTN, but I’ve compiled a list of blog posts here, so contact me if you’re missing! They are ordered chronologically, or at least in the order I found them. There are some posts with similar, or the same, name. Multiple people can have the same favourite feature. 🙂

OTN Appreciation Day +1. 🙂

Check out pieter v. puymbroeck, who wrote a script (here) to scrape the results from Twitter. Ruben Rodriguez did a similar thing using MCS and JET. I did it the long and painful way because I’m an old-timer. 🙂

Thanks to everyone that wrote a blog post. It was good to see some new, nearly new and returning faces, as well as the usual suspects. I was glad to see some of our Latin American community blogging in Spanish. What’s really cool is the diversity of stuff people posted. Some people took it in a completely different direction, which made it more interesting. Thanks to all those people that tweeted messages of support and retweeted content throughout the day. We got people joining in because they saw the buzz you helped create! And of course, #ThanksOTN. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Some latecomers added. 🙂

OTN Appreciation Day : Data Pump (expdp, impdp)

pump Here’s my contribution to the OTN Appreciation Day.

Data Pump (expdp, impdp) was added in Oracle 10g as a replacement for the rather tired exp/imp utilities, which although useful, were severely lacking in functionality. So why do I like Data Pump? Here are a few standouts for me, but I’m sure other people will prefer others. 🙂

Transportable Tablespaces, and from 12c onward Transportable Database, make moving large amounts of data, or even whole databases easy. This can include platform/endian changes and version upgrade too. This was possible with exp/imp too, but it doesn’t stop it being a useful feature of Data Pump. 🙂
The INCLUDE, EXCLUDE, CONTENT and QUERY parameters allow a lot of flexibility about what you include or exclude from your exports and imports.
The FLASHBACK_TIME parameter allows you to do an export of the data based on a point in time, undo permitting, which allows you to make truly consistent exports.
The REMAP parameters allow you to rename tablespaces, datafiles, schemas, tables and even alter the data during operations.
The DBMS_DATAPUMP package provides a PL/SQL API, allowing you to perform Data Pump operations without having to shell out to the OS. That makes automation a lot simpler.
The NETWORK_LINK parameter can be used to perform export and import operations over a database link. This allows you to create a dump file on a remote database, or even import without an intermediate dump file.

I’m sure beginners think Data Pump is just for doing exports and imports of small databases, but it’s got loads of features. If you’ve not kept up with the new releases, you might be surprised just how much it can do!

If you’re interested in reading something more technical about Data Pump, here are some articles from my website.

Cheers

Tim…