Well I’ve had a busy time recently. As well as moving house and starting a new contract, I decided that I should run my PX paper past a few trusted individuals for review before it’s published in Select magazine. (Sorry Tom, I do tend to trust *some* people.) Here’s a tip for you all – don’t ask the likes of Jonathan Lewis or Tom Kyte for technical editing – you’ll just end up having to do more work! Only kidding.
Everyone was extremely helpful and although the basic structure of the paper might not have changed radically, it’s better for the corrections. The embarrassment of making errors is hard to take of course, particularly when one was super-size, but not as bad as the embarrassment of finding out later that you’ve led people up a particularly overgrown garden path. That’ll teach me to be more careful before I commit myself to print next time. Anyway, the updated version of the paper is here –http://oracledoug.com/px.pdf (or px.doc, or px.html – take your pick). I was on the verge of rewriting it from scratch at one point but decided there’s enough useful information in there, particularly if you haven’t worked with px before. (I’ve certainly had some positive feedback from people who it’s helped.) I reserve the right to make further changes as I get time to discuss it further with others and digest what they have to say, but it’s improved enough to pass muster I think. Personally, I think the diagrams are most likely to change, because they’re the bit I’m most unhappy with. But I had to make a decision about whether to let this version go when I might not be 100% happy, or withdraw the whole thing, or keep the old version.
So I’m still thinking over the diagrams, but after that I’m going to dig deeper into DFOs, slave sets and inter-slave communication, prompted by some of the feedback from Jonathan that got me thinking again …