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When you’re teaching, a personal introduction is almost mandatory to help people get to know you, establish a little credibility and just get everyone talking to each other. Whenever I did mine, I’d explain what I’d done with Oracle, teaching and IT in general, talk about a couple of personal interests but the one thing… Continue reading Competely OT – ZX Spectrum Games

The Dog has had his run for now. Although I find the prevalence of portrait photos on the internet faintly amusing and embarassing, with the conference coming up, it might be worth people being able to put a name to a face prior to the bloggers dinner, for example. I have lots of interesting photos… Continue reading RIP Dog

I’ve been looking for something to read about Oracle recently and couldn’t wait until Jonathan Lewis’ CBO book arrived. I knew of TOTOT (as Mogens N�rgaard has referred to it) and planned to buy it at some stage because I’ve loved past work by some of the authors, but didn’t rush to buy it because… Continue reading Book Review: Oracle Insights, Tales of the Oak Table

What’s good enough for Niall is good enough for me … Here’s my agenda for the UKOUG conference Sunday – Oak Table day. Like Niall, I won’t be there at the start, but even half a day of this standard will add a lot to the conference for me. Then onto the volunteers meeting (apparently… Continue reading UKOUG Agenda

Well, that’s the HTML version of the CASE paper available. It would have been quicker if I didn’t have such an archaic approach to HTML development for the site. I’d rather not talk about it at the moment, immediately after finishing, but Wordpad is in there somewhere 🙁 I like the boxes though – let… Continue reading CASE Article – HTML version

I’ve uploaded the MS Word and PDF versions of a new paper about CASE expressions, which is really just a replacement for the earlier DECODE paper. This one has been an unexpected trial, probably because it was a bit of a chore that I knew I had to get round to because the DECODE approach… Continue reading CASE Article

A couple of days ago one of my colleagues raised the question – ‘ANSI join syntax, does anyone actually use that?’ I have pretty strong views on this and so a brief dynamic conversation followed (and that isn’t a euphemism for ‘stand-up row’, I should add!) So, what about ANSI join syntax? To give the… Continue reading ANSI Join Syntax

I’ve received several emails pointing out Don Burleson’s apology for calling me British instead of Scottish that was on his website (but has been removed now). I asked Don to take it down for a few reasons :- I was born and remain British. I was born and remain Scottish. The two are compatible. I… Continue reading Another Apology

Well, I might as well put my hand up now. I don’t like Indian food. The fact is I just don’t like spicy food much (and I once described a poppadom as being a bit spicy!) which is largely down to being spoiled rotten when I was a kid by a mother who wouldn’t force… Continue reading Indian Food

Yesterday I attended the one day OUG Scotland conference in Glasgow. I think there must have been 200-300 attendees and there were three streams of presentations. I was immediately impressed at the organisation and venue. It felt like a proper conference rather than just a slightly bigger user group meeting. After the usual opening from… Continue reading OUG Scotland 2005 Conference