OraNA :: General

Speaking in the Boston Area Next Week

Michael Feldstein — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:32:33 PDT

I’ll be giving a talk for UMassOnline on the morning of Thursday, August 5th in Shrewsbury, MA. The title of the talk is “W(h)ither the LMS?” You can read my guest post on the UMassOnline blog here and register for the event here.

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Why Not Go to a Party School?

Michael Feldstein — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:25:36 PDT

This is a guest post by Jim Farmer. Jim is Chairman of instructional media + magic.

Analysis of data recently released by PayScale Inc. and published in Bloomberg Business Week show starting salaries for graduates of Party Schools begin fifth of seven sectors moving up to third place by mid-career. Party Schools have a rate of salary increase exceeded only by graduates of Ivy League universities:

The data comes from 611,000 surveys completed as profiles on the PayScaleWeb Site.

PayScale also has data by college major and job title. This has been matched with data about U.S. colleges and universities from the U.S. Department of Education’s IPEDS surveys and colleges costs from the College Board. Bureau of Labor Statistics costs of living may also have been the source of data used for cost of living by city or state.

The rates of increase from starting to mid-career may be a better, though questionable, proxy for the quality of collegiate education.

These data could be cited supporting the view that graduates from Liberal Arts have lower starting salaries—bottom of the list—but increasing rapidly during their career.

These are aggregate statistics; the starting salaries and increases depend upon the individual student and student choices. PayScale offers disaggregated data for specific colleges and areas of study on their Web site (wwww.payscale.com). The data for an individual profile or specific college or university and area of study would be more reliable than the aggregated statistics given here.

Evaluating the value of higher education solely on the return of investment to the student may be limiting. Responding to these data, Pat Pike, interim provost and vice-provost for education at Biola University, writes: “If monetary Return on Investment (ROI) were the main purpose of education, most of us would make different career decisions. Biola’s education is not primarily about money. If you calculated the ROI for the society of a Biola education, compared to the average, it would be huge. The services and benefits accruing to the nation and the world from Biola alumni far outweigh the cost of the Biola education. When you focus on the wider picture of the impact alumni make in their community and across the world to serve (primarily in nonprofit and service-oriented organizations), you have greater rationale to praise the value of Biola education.” “Biola University is a nationally ranked private Christian university located in Southern California [LaMirada].”

Data for the tables was developed from PayScale data for 852 “most popular” colleges and universities. The data was prepared for Bloomberg Business Week and can be found at http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/bs_collegeROI_0621.html

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Post tags: DIY U, edunomics, PayScale

Advice for some non-clients

Curt Monash — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:35:52 PDT

Most of what I get paid for is in some form or other consulting. (The same would be true for many other analysts.) And so I can be a bit stingy with my advice toward non-clients. But my non-clients are a distinguished and powerful group, including in their number Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and most of the BI vendors. So here’s a bit of advice for them too.

Oracle. On the plus side, you guys have been making progress against your reputation for untruthfulness. Oh, I’ve dinged you for some past slip-ups, but on the whole they’ve been no worse than other vendors.’ But recently you pulled a doozy. The analyst reports section of your website fails to distinguish between unsponsored and sponsored work.* That is a horrible ethical stumble. Fix it fast. Then put processes in place to ensure nothing that dishonest happens again for a good long time.

*Merv Adrian’s “report” listed high on that page is actually a sponsored white paper. That Merv himself screwed up by not labeling it clearly as such in no way exonerates Oracle. Besides, I’m sure Merv won’t soon repeat the error — but for Oracle, this represents a whole pattern of behavior.

Oracle. And while I’m at it, outright dishonesty isn’t your only unnecessary credibility problem. You’re also playing too many games in analyst relations.

HP. Neoview will never succeed. Admit it to yourselves. Go buy something that can.

Smaller BI vendors. Analytic DBMS evaluations commonly include BI strategy and tool selection as well. If an analytic DBMS expert tells you he needs to learn more about your product line, don’t blow him off. In fact, you should be particularly embracing anybody who’s shown a fondness for small DBMS vendors; maybe he or his clients will like small BI vendors as well. That means (among others) you, Jaspersoft, Endeca, and Tableau.

Information Builders. Is there anything about your BI products that is in any way technologically differentiated? If so, you might want to mention some examples to somebody some time.

Kalido. I’ve said this to you before, but it bears repeating — your positioning translates to “I-CASE for analytics,” and that’s not a good thing. If your product is not as cumbersome and entrapping as that sounds, you need to do a much better job of explaining why not.

SenSage. You are what you are. Sell out while the selling is good. You don’t have the corporate personality to make it into the analytic DBMS mainstream on your own.

Ingres. You need to be more engaged with analysts than you are. Ingres navel-gazed too much 25 years ago, and evidently you haven’t outgrown it yet.

TIBCO. You probably have a lot of cool analytic technology, but I don’t know of an influencer who has much relationship with or trust in you. Rethink how you’re approaching influencer relations top to bottom.

Tableau. You had a lot of mindshare, but it’s fading. Do something.

MarkLogic, graph DBMS vendors, etc. You’re clinging too hard to the NoSQL label. Nobody is out there deciding among Cassandra, neo4j, and MarkLogic. They might be deciding between MongoDB and MarkLogic, I guess, but if you admit to yourself that’s all it is you’ll probably change your messaging somewhat.

Objectivity. Get real about marketing. Infinite Graph is a cool opportunity. But I didn’t even ping you for a meeting when I’m in your area next week, because I wouldn’t have known who to reach out to.

Everybody (especially Objectivity). “First X deployed in the cloud” is almost surely an inaccurate claim. Don’t make it. And by the way, even if it were true, it probably wouldn’t be interesting.

WLS, EBS, OpenWorld, OBIEE, Thinking, SOA

Christopher Gait, Oracle Infogram Editor — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:54:10 PDT

WLS

Have your errors emailed to your from the WLS log? Yes, you can do that. James Bayer's blog has a posting on it.

EBS

This week at the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology

Update #1: EBS Plans for 64-bit Windows 7 Clients

Sysadmin Primer: Oracle Identity Management 11gR1

OpenWorld

OpenWorld is growing on the horizon, as the Real World Performance Group reminds us on the Structured Data blog.

OBIEE

The Ritmann Mead blog continues its excellent series on OBIEE 11gR1: OBIEE 11gR1 : Incremental Patches to the RPD.

Thinking

Cary Millsap cavalierly uses an example from elementary school fractions to explain clear thinking. I say cavalierly, because he assumes I remember elementary school fractions (I think I was in remedial shop class that year, rebuilding the shop after the the notorious bird house incident the year before. I'm not a handyman. If I install a towel rack we end up having to call in the fire department).

It's still a good read, as are all Cary's posts: Thinking Clearly is more important than the Right Answer.

SOA

Looks like there's another book out there to help you along. The SOA Suite 11g R1 Developers Guide announced at the SOA@Oracle SCA, BPEL, BPM & Service Bus blog (that blog name needs more acronyms, perhaps a fake one in the middle to see if people are paying attention).

ADF 11g: Select all rows in an ADF table.

Luc Bors — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:59:42 PDT

I get a lot of questions on how to select all rows in a table. In this post I describe how you can do that. A common use case for this is when you want to apply changes on a set of records, for instance change the status of all records in a table. You [...]

External Views (XML based)

Marco Gralike — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:05:09 PDT

Something new? Eh? Should you do this? Eh? In all, probably not, but for me this was a good exercise towards some more updated demo scripting for my “Boost your environment with XMLDB” presentation or hopefully more clearer relabeled Oracle Open World name for the almost same presentation called “Interfacing with Your Database via Oracle XML [...]

Oracle name change to Java update causes problems

Mark Fontecchio — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:20:01 PDT

Earlier this month, Oracle released a service update to Java SE 6, called Update 21. It created unforeseen problems because of Oracle’s attempts to rebrand Sun products into Oracle products.

In particular, it caused incompatibility with Eclipse, the open source Java development environment, because Oracle changed the company name property on java.exe from “Sun Microsystems” to “Oracle.” From Slashdot:

“In Java 1.6.0_21, the company field was changed from ‘Sun Microsystems, Inc’ to ‘Oracle.’ Apparently not the best idea, because some applications depend on that field to identify the virtual machine. All Eclipse versions since 3.3 (released 2007) until and including the recent Helios release (2010) have been reported to crash with an OutOfMemoryError due to this change. This is particularly funny since the update is deployed through automatic update and suddenly applications cease to work.”

Oracle has since undone the switch, changing the name field back to “Sun Microsystems.” But the subtle change is an indication of how hard acquisitions can be. Absorbing a big, multibiliion-dollar company like Sun into the Oracle brand is no small task. In this case, third party software relied on that company name field being “Sun Microsystems.” When it wasn’t, and the change was likewise not mentioned in the release notes, it caused problems.

Those in the open source community began pointing fingers at Oracle right away because, well, I guess it’s fun for some to point fingers at Oracle. But while Oracle does deserve some of the blame, here, others are at fault as well:

There was already an anomaly in Sun’s Java that caused Eclipse to freak out a bit; as a workaround, Eclipse simply ignored the anomaly if “Sun Microsystems, Inc” was in the “company” field of the Java install. It seems more to me less an instance of Oracle “breaking” Java and more an instance of an old bug that should have been fixed long ago rearing its ugly head after a hack workaround no longer helped. But the story has legs because it feeds into people’s pre-existing ideas of Oracle as a Borg-like absorber of all — and people’s natural fondness in seeing a big guy tripped up.

Oracle has already provided a fix for this, changing the company name field back to “Sun Microsystems” for the time being. But it also warned in its update that it would be changing the company name to “Oracle” for future versions.

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

PeopleSoft

Angela Golla — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:47:21 PDT

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

PeopleSoft Enterprise Integration Points for 9.1 (Hosted HTML and PDF)

The following link will take you to our PeopleSoft Hosted Enterprise Intergration Point Diagrams site. This interactive site will allow you to view various levels of our Enterprise Intergration Point Diagrams and search on specific criteria. PDF versions of the diagrams are also available on the site. HCM 9.1 is available, other product lines coming soon.

https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=show&type=NOT&doctype=REFERENCE&id=1157149.1

New LMS Entrant: NIXTY

Michael Feldstein — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:32:51 PDT

You may have already heard a bit about NIXTY, since they have managed to make a significant media splash in the last few weeks. There have been a number of interesting analyses, both pro and con. I’d like to highlight a few aspects that haven’t gotten much coverage.

For starters, here’s a screencast that NIXTY CEO Glen Moriarty was kind enough to make for me:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(...)
Read the rest of New LMS Entrant: NIXTY (611 words)

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2010. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: NIXTY, OER, Open content, Open Educational Resources

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison gets real paid, to the tune of $1.84 billion

Mark Fontecchio — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:26:45 PDT

Courtesy of The Wall Street Journal

According a report in The Wall Street Journal today, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was the best paid executive of a public company in the last decade, raking in a whopping $1.84 billion.

As you can see on the right in the picture from The Wall Street Journal, Ellison’s salary accounts for a very small fraction of his overall compensation. Most comes from gains on options that came as a result of the company thriving over the last 10 years.

Ellison tops a 25-member list that includes Larry Diller of Interactive Corp./Expedia.com, Ray Irani of Occidental Petroleum, and Steve Jobs at Apple. Other technology-related CEOs in the mix include Terry Semel at Yahoo, Michael Dell at Dell and John Chambers at Cisco.

Unlike many on the list, Ellison’s high level of compensation went hand-in-hand with the company’s performance. Jobs was another example. But there were some on the list, such as Dell, who received big compensation packages despite their companies performing poorly.

DTrace creator follows in footsteps of Phipps, Gosling with Oracle exit

Shayna Garlick — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:48:34 PDT

While Oracle has gained control of Sun technologies, the software giant has also lost some of the people key to their development. Could this hurt them down the road?

First it was Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, then Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps and then the ‘Father of Java’ James Gosling - and now, Bryan Cantrill, one of the authors of Sun’s DTrace technology, has left Oracle to “to venture again into something new.”

In Cantrill’s latest blog entry - which any mention of Oracle is noticeably absent from - he details his 14-year career with Sun, highlighting his involvement in Fishworks, and the Sun Storage 7000 series. In the July 25 post, titled “Good-bye, Sun,” he also expresses his gratitude to many of his Sun co-workers and what they taught him.

“One of Sun’s greatest strengths was that we technologists were never discouraged from interacting directly and candidly with our customers and users, and many of our most important innovations came from these relationships,” he wrote.

Is Cantrill implying that these relationships are something Oracle lacks? That’s what one article on H-online suggests, saying it may be an indication of the culture at Oracle, since “Oracle has developed a reputation for being very hard to communicate with.”

Still, this doesn’t seem to be anything that Oracle or Larry Ellison plan on changing soon. Since the Sun acquisition, lack of communication has become evident as customers are left wondering about Oracle’s future; for example, wary users are still without a clear roadmap for Solaris and OpenSolaris.

Even when Oracle does provide information — such as details about its stack computing strategy - customers have said that they’re not saying enough. The OpenSolaris governing board has also threatened to dissolve, citing a lack of communication between the Oracle and the OpenSolaris community.

ADF 11g Skinning: Three ways to change look and feel

Luc Bors — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:12:24 PDT

On the JDeveloper ADF forum there are many questions on how to change the look and feel of components. In this post I’ll explain three ways to do that. Setting skin Selector property For this we need to define a custom skin. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <skins xmlns="http://myfaces.apache.org/trinidad/skin"> <skin> <id>mySkin.desktop</id> <family>MySkin</family> [...]

The Tragedy of the Commons in Cloud standards

William (@vambenepe on Twitter) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:07:01 PDT

I wasn’t at the OSCON Cloud Summit this past week, but I’ve spent some time over the weekend trying to collect the good bits. Via Twitter, I had heard echos of an interesting debate on Cloud standards between Sam Johnston and Benjamin Black. Today I got to see Benjamin’s slides and read reports from two audience members, Charles Engelke and Krishnan Subramanian. Sam argued that Cloud standards are needed, Benjamin that they would be premature.

Benjamin is right about what to think and Sam is right about what to do.

Let me put it differently: Benjamin is right in theory, but it doesn’t matter. Here is why.

Say I’m a vendor and Benjamin convinces me

Assume I truly believe the industry would be better served if we all waited. Does this mean I’ll stay away from Cloud standards efforts for now? Not necessarily, because nothing is stopping my competitors from doing it. In the IT standards world, your only choice is to participate or opt out. For the most part you can’t put your muscle towards stopping an effort. Case in point, Amazon has so far chosen to opt out; has that stopped VMWare and others from going to DMTF and elsewhere to ratify specifications as standards? Of course not. To the contrary, it has made the option even more attractive because when the leader stays home it is a lot easier for less popular candidates to win the prize. So as a vendor-who-was-convinced-by-Benjamin I now have the choice between letting my competitor get his specification rubberstamped (and then hit me with the competitive advantage of being “standard compliant” and even “the standard leader”) or getting involved in an effort that I know to be counterproductive for the industry. Guess what most will choose?

Even the initial sinner (who sets the wheels of premature standardization in motion) may himself be convinced that it’s too early for Cloud standards. But he has to assume that one of his competitors will make the move, and in that context why give them first mover advantage (and the choice of the battlefield). It’s the typical Tragedy of the Commons scenario. By acting in a rational and self-interested way, participants invariably end up creating a bad situation, one that they might all know is against everyone’s self interest.

And it’s not just vendors.

Say I’m an officer of a Standard-setting organization and Benjamin convinces me

If you expect that I would use my position in the organization to prevent companies from starting a Cloud standard effort there, you live in fantasy-land. Standard-setting organizations compete with one another just as fiercely as companies do. If I have achieved a position of leadership in a given standard organization, the last thing I want is to see another organization lay claims to a strategic and fast-growing area of the IT landscape. It takes a lot of time and money for a company to get elected on the right board and gets its employees (or other reliable allies) in the right leadership positions. Or to acquire people already in that place. You only get a return on that investment if the organization manages to be the one where the key standards get created. That’s what’s behind the landgrab reflex of many standards organizations.

And it goes beyond vendors and standards organizations

Say I’m an IT buyer and Benjamin convinces me

Assume I really believe Cloud standards are premature. Assume they get created anyway and I have to choose between a vendor who supports them and one who doesn’t. Do I, as a matter of principle, refuse consider the “standard-compliant” label in my purchasing decision? Even if I know that the standard shouldn’t have been created, I also know that, all other things being equal, the “standard-compliant” product will attract more tools and complementary solutions and will likely ease future integration problems.

And then there is the question of how I’ll explain this to my boss. Will Benjamin be by my side with his beautiful slides when I am called in an emergency meeting to explain to the CIO why we, unlike the competitors, didn’t pick “a standards-based solution”?

In the real world, the only way to solve problems caused by the Tragedy of the Commons is to have some overarching authority regulate the usage of the resource at risk of being ruined. This seems unlikely to be a workable solution when the resource is not a river to protect from sewer discharges but an IT domain to protect from premature standardization. If called, I’d be happy to serve as benevolent dictator for the IT industry (I could fix a few other things beyond the Cloud standards landgrab issue). But as long as neither I nor anyone else is in a dictatorial position, Benjamin’s excellent exposé has no audience for which his call to arms (or rather to lay down the arms) is actionable. I am not saying that everyone agrees with Benjamin, but that even if everyone did it still wouldn’t make a difference. Many of us in the industry share his views and rationally act as if we didn’t.

[UPDATED 2010/7/25: In a nice example of Blog/Twitter synergy, minutes after posting this I was having a conversation on Twitter with Benjamin Black about my interpretation of what he said. Based on this conversation, I realize that I should clarify that what I mean by "standards" in this post is "something that comes out of a standard-setting organization" (whether or not it gets adopted), in other words what Benjamin calls a "standard specification". He uses the word "standard" to mean "what most people use", which may or may not be a "standard specification". That's a big part of the disconnect that led to our Twitter chat. The other part is that what I presented as Benjamin's thesis in my post is actually only one of the propositions in his talk, and not even the main one. It's the proposition that it is damaging for the industry when a standard specification comes out of a standard organization too early. I wasn't at the conference where Benjamin presented but it's hard to understand anything else out of slide 61 ("standardize too soon, and you lock to the wrong thing") and 87 ("to discover the right standards, we must eschew standards"). So if I misrepresented him I believe it was in making it look like this was the focus of his talk while in fact it was only one of the points he made. As he himself clarified for me: "My _actual_ argument is that it doesn't matter what we think about cloud standards, if they are needed, they will emerge" (again, in this sentence he uses "standards" to mean "something that people have converged on").

More generally, my main point here has nothing to do with Benjamin, Sam and their OSCON debate, other than the fact that reading about it prompted me to type this blog entry. It's simply that there is a perversion in the IT standards landscape that makes it impossible for premature standardization *not* to happen. It's something I've written before, e.g. in this post:

Saying “it’s too early” in the standards world is the same as saying nothing. It puts you out of the game and has no other effect. Amazon, the clear leader in the space, has taken just this position. How has this been understood? Simply as “well I guess we’ll do it without them”. It’s sad, but all it takes is one significant (but not necessarily leader) company trying to capitalize on some market influence to force the standards train to leave the station. And it’s a hard decision for others to not engage the pursuit at that point. In the same way that it only takes one bellicose country among pacifists to start a war.

Benjamin is just a messenger; and I wasn't trying to shoot him.]

Oracle of the Day in SL for 23-JUL-2010

Christopher Gait, Oracle Infogram Editor — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 06:32:39 PDT

The Yi Jing text to study for today, 23-JUL-2010 is Hexagram 30, Judgment, and Hexagram 43, Judgment.

The SL version is:

300

Radiance.

Good auspice.

Ask again.

Find a virtual cow and care for it.

Persevere.

In the end things work out.

430

Decisions.

Snakes and dragons abound.

Before making a move, announce your decision to all involved.

Danger, but still a good time for travel and action.

The James Legge translation is:

離：利貞，亨。畜牝牛，吉。

Li:

Li indicates that, (in regard to what it denotes), it will be advantageous to be firm and correct, and that thus there will be free course and success. Let (its subject) also nourish (a docility like that of) the cow, and there will be good fortune.

夬：揚于王庭，孚號，有厲，告自邑，不利即戎，利有攸往。

Guai:

Guai requires (in him who would fulfil its meaning) the exhibition (of the culprit's guilt) in the royal court, and a sincere and earnest appeal (for sympathy and support), with a consciousness of the peril (involved in cutting off the criminal). He should (also) make announcement in his own city, and show that it will not be well to have recourse at once to arms. (In this way) there will be advantage in whatever he shall go forward to.

(Chinese texts and public domain translations from The Chinese Text Project.

http://chinese.dsturgeon.net/text.pl?node=3925&if=en)

_______________________________

The daily verses from the Analects of Confucius to read for today are Chapter 3, Verses 24, 25 and 26..

(below is the James Legge's translation. I recommend buying the edition by Edward Slingerland, ISBN 0872206351)

24 八佾:

儀封人請見。曰：“君子之至於斯也，吾未嘗不得見也。”從者見之。出曰：“二三子，何患於喪乎？天下之無道也久矣，天將以夫子為木鐸。”

Ba Yi:

The border warden at I requested to be introduced to the Master, saying, "When men of superior virtue have come to this, I have never been denied the privilege of seeing them." The followers of the sage introduced him, and when he came out from the interview, he said, "My friends, why are you distressed by your master's loss of office? The kingdom has long been without the principles of truth and right; Heaven is going to use your master as a bell with its wooden tongue."

25 八佾:

子謂韶，“盡美矣，又盡善也。”謂武，“盡美矣，未盡善也”。

Ba Yi:

The Master said of the Shao that it was perfectly beautiful and also perfectly good. He said of the Wu that it was perfectly beautiful but not perfectly good.

26 八佾:

子曰：“居上不寬，為禮不敬，臨喪不哀，吾何以觀之哉？”

Ba Yi:

The Master said, "High station filled without indulgent generosity; ceremonies performed without reverence; mourning conducted without sorrow - wherewith should I contemplate such ways?"

Annonce : Oracle WebCenter Spaces & iPhone

Jean-Philippe Pinte — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 05:03:21 PDT

Une application iPhone est désormais disponible sur iTunes pour accéder à Oracle WebCenter Spaces.

Evènement : de la virtualisation à la supervision

Jean-Philippe Pinte — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 04:59:13 PDT

L'évènement technique de la rentrée aura lieu le 8 septembre prochain : "Database 11g : de la virtualisation à la supervision".

Au travers d’ateliers, les thèmes suivants seront abordés :

Performance & Haute disponibilité
Supervision & Sécurité
Data Management
Consolidation & Virtualisation

Oracle PIM/Inventory Question: If the item is created in Oracle PIM, should it be first created in the Master Organization within the inventory module?

BobBarnett — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 04:07:06 PDT

A question was asked by a beginner in PIM within another social networking site regarding items in Oracle EBS/PIM applications. I thought it is a good question to put into the blog for PIM and EBS. I hope I am correct.

An item is ALWAYS created in a defined master organization in PIM. Though it is not coincidence that it is an Oracle EBS configured master organization. It is mandatory to define the item in a master organization.

Do not concern yourself with the Inventory module. When you create an item in PIM, it is the same item that is created in the Inventory module. When you create an item in the Inventory module’s Master Item form, that same item is fully available in the PIM html forms. They both share the same mtl_system_items_b table as well as others.

It is only when you define attribute groups that you have additional information in PIM regarding the item.

In fact, item catalog categories and item catalog groups are the same thing. But, you get more functionality in PIM regarding their usage.

Please consider PIM as a mandatory module to purchase in your next upgrade or implementation. It has proven to be highly useful in multiple industries.

Have a great one!

Bob

Some interesting links

Curt Monash — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 02:04:48 PDT

In no particular order:

Neil Raden points out that business intelligence dashboards can be dangerously misleading. His reasoning (sound) is that whatever you measure is apt to be distorted by the fact people know they’re being measured. His solution (implied) is to hire a good-looking consultant like himself to do it right.
I’ve had my issues with Fred Holahan, who was VP of Marketing when I posted that EnterpriseDB was not to be trusted. (That said, Fred is long gone from EnterpriseDB and my opinion hasn’t changed.) But he’s put up a good series of posts on the basis of the open source “progressive engagement” marketing funnel, including this gem on why you shouldn’t count on monetizing your community/free users.
Oracle plans to increase its acquisition budget. The figure given is $70 billion over the next 5 years. Edit: But see this funny Register followup.
Clayton Christensen wrote a phenomenal article on how to live a good life, from a very business-y perspective. (Only in one anecdote was it too religiously-oriented for my tastes.) Takeaways include:
- Your core goals probably revolve around something other than business success. (E.g., family.) Don’t lose sight of that.
- To the extent you’re a manager or leader, you may have a huge impact on other people’s lives. Use that power in admirable ways.
- Teach people how to fish for answers, rather than just giving them answers. They’ll probably come to better conclusions than you would have anyway. (This is a core principle in my own consulting.)
- Take time to reflect. And by the way, the same techniques you use for strategic analysis in business can be applied to your life as well.
Mark Suster has a pretty good post expanding on my first Christensen takeaway, highlighting a point too often missing from articles in that genre: It’s not just family; it’s also all the cool things around us.
I haven’t gone through the Hadoop Summit archives yet, but it looks as if there’s a lot of insight there about current Hadoop application activity.
If you’re a cat lover and don’t hate simple/traditional music, check out Marc Gunn’s cat filksongs, especially the infectious “What Shall We Do With a Catnipped Kitty?” and “Lord of the Pounce”, both playable from the right sidebar of that page (#7 and #10 respectively). Gunn is also a chief perpetrator of the justly (in)famous Do Virgins Taste Better? cycle of filksongs.
Former SAP exec Dennis Moore offers a theory as to why SAP cares so much about in-memory DBMS. It’s to integrate business processes, because SAP has no other software layer good at doing same. Interestingly, Dennis originated SAP’s previous attempt at meeting a similar need via its composite applications initiative. However, in Dennis’ view this benefit would only be achieved by a major rewrite of SAP’s applications.

Business Intelligence and Warehouse Builder

Asmi Maharishi — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:19:06 PDT

Deriving and Sharing Business Intelligence Metadata
By Mark Rittman
Learn how to integrate Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g Release 2 information with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.

Oracle Warehouse Builder Product Roadmap
For the benefit of existing and prospective Oracle customers and partners, this data sheet reviews Oracle Warehouse Builder’s history, current success, and the direction of future releases.

EBS, ECM, MySQL, WLS, APEX, Compression, PeopleSoft, OpenWorld

Christopher Gait, Oracle Infogram Editor — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 10:18:10 PDT

EBS

New this week at the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog:

Database 11gR2 11.2.0.1 Certified on HP-UX 11.31 for E-Business Suite

Warning: E-Business Suite Issues with Sun JRE 1.6.0_21

New Apps 11i AutoConfig + Templates Rollup Patch U Now Available

Oracle E-Business Suite AccessGate Release 1.0.2 Now Available

ECM

Over at the Oracle ECM Alerts - Product News & Information there is an announcement on the latest quarterly customer update: Recording Available: June 2010 Quarterly Customer Update Webcast

MySQL

Wondering about the path of MySQL since the merger? Here's the official you betcha Oracle corporate page on it. (Thought I was going to lay out some secret and controversial link, didn't you?).

WLS

Thinking about Web Logic Server? Raghu Yadav has a brief posting with the links you'll need to download it, get an idea of cost and get started.

APEX

Some pointers this week on APEX 4.0 issues from David Peake for those bold and adventurous souls who live on the edge.

Compression

On the wonderfully named Oracle Related Stuff blog we have some handy reminders on limitations of compression. I would also remind you that GoldenGate still does not support compression, but we are working on it.

PeopleSoft

Over at the PeopleSoft/Oracle blog there's a link to Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise Hosted PeopleBooks.

OpenWorld

OpenWorld is right around the corner, and some of the presenters of interest to the performance world are publishing their sessions. If it's anything like the conferences I've attended in the past you'll want to clone yourself to attend all the sessions you are interested in. Here's a posting with scheduling info from the Striving for Optimal Performance blog.

OraNA :: General

Speaking in the Boston Area Next Week

Why Not Go to a Party School?

Advice for some non-clients

WLS, EBS, OpenWorld, OBIEE, Thinking, SOA

ADF 11g: Select all rows in an ADF table.

External Views (XML based)

Oracle name change to Java update causes problems

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram ContributorPeopleSoft

New LMS Entrant: NIXTY

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison gets real paid, to the tune of $1.84 billion

DTrace creator follows in footsteps of Phipps, Gosling with Oracle exit

ADF 11g Skinning: Three ways to change look and feel

The Tragedy of the Commons in Cloud standards

Oracle of the Day in SL for 23-JUL-2010

Annonce : Oracle WebCenter Spaces & iPhone

Evènement : de la virtualisation à la supervision

Oracle PIM/Inventory Question: If the item is created in Oracle PIM, should it be first created in the Master Organization within the inventory module?

Some interesting links

Business Intelligence and Warehouse Builder

EBS, ECM, MySQL, WLS, APEX, Compression, PeopleSoft, OpenWorld

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

PeopleSoft