{"id":1394,"date":"2008-03-20T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-20T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/?p=1394"},"modified":"2008-03-20T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-03-20T12:00:00","slug":"theres-hope-for-us-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/20\/theres-hope-for-us-all\/","title":{"rendered":"There&#8217;s Hope for us all"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I empathise with <a href=\"http:\/\/orastory.wordpress.com\/2008\/03\/19\/the-dearth-of-oracle-rdbms-and-contracting\/\">Dom Brook&#8217;s recent blog post<\/a>. We&#8217;ve all been there and I don&#8217;t just mean being unable to write a technical post when emotions and opinions need to be dealt with first <script data-pagespeed-no-defer=\"\" type=\"text\/javascript\">\/\/<![CDATA[\n(function(){for(var g=\"function\"==typeof Object.defineProperties?Object.defineProperty:function(b,c,a){if(a.get||a.set)throw new TypeError(\"ES3 does not support getters and setters.\");b!=Array.prototype&#038;&#038;b!=Object.prototype&#038;&#038;(b[c]=a.value)},h=\"undefined\"!=typeof window&#038;&#038;window===this?this:\"undefined\"!=typeof global&#038;&#038;null!=global?global:this,k=[\"String\",\"prototype\",\"repeat\"],l=0;l<k.length-1;l++){var m=k[l];m in h||(h[m]={});h=h[m]}var n=k[k.length-1],p=h[n],q=p?p:function(b){var c;if(null==this)throw new TypeError(\"The 'this' value for String.prototype.repeat must not be null or undefined\");c=this+\"\";if(0>b||1342177279<b)throw new RangeError(\"Invalid count value\");b|=0;for(var 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(I&#8217;m full of promises, eh?) when I&#8217;ll have a wee rant about the state of the industry myself. Isn&#8217;t that what blogs are for sometimes?<\/p>\n<p>However, what this post is really about is a comment that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.evdbt.com\/\">Tim Gorman<\/a> sent to the Oak Table mailing list, where Dom&#8217;s posting has been today&#8217;s favourite topic. I believe he posted it on Oracle-L first. Although it doesn&#8217;t reflect my personal experience in the slightest, there was something about what he had to say and the way he said it that rung very true to me and I wanted to post it here.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;<i>Back in the 1980s, I worked for a company that had built some really cool applications in the area of travel reservations.  Eventually, the travel providers (i.e. airlines, hotels, car rental agencies, etc) caught on to what we were doing and did it themselves, effectively putting us out of business overnight.  So, it came time to sell the company off in pieces.  We tried to sell the applications, but nobody wanted them &#8212; they had their own, or could buy or build better.  We sold the hardware and facilities, but for pennies on the dollar.  Then, when we tried to sell the data, we hit the jackpot &#8212; everybody wanted the data, and we were able to sell it over and over again, to multiple buyers.<\/p>\n<p>    I never forgot that lesson, and several years later traded being a programmer for being a DBA because (as Michael just said, below) I like working with data.  Data, not programs, is the only thing that matters &#8212; applications are transient and have no value except to acquire, manipulate, and display data.  Data is the only thing with value.  The long-term value of data is the reason I&#8217;ve moved toward data warehousing and business intelligence, too.<\/p>\n<p>    Data is important.  Databases manage data.  DBAs architect, configure, and manage databases.  So, being a skilled database administrator will always be necessary as long as data exists.  If the state of the art ceases advancing, then automation will finally catch up to extinguish the DBA role\/job.  But until then, being a DBA is a career. <\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and that&#8217;s my story, and I&#8217;m sticking to it, regardless of the latest flavor-of-the-month heralding the death of the database&#8230;<\/i>&#8220;<\/p>\n<p>Thanks, Tim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I empathise with Dom Brook&#8217;s recent blog post. We&#8217;ve all been there and I don&#8217;t just mean being unable to write a technical post when emotions and opinions need to be dealt with first In fact, a day wll come soon (I&#8217;m full of promises, eh?) when I&#8217;ll have a wee rant about the state&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/20\/theres-hope-for-us-all\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">There&#8217;s Hope for us all<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1064,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2006\/08\/23\/an-open-letter-to-steve-jobs\/","url_meta":{"origin":1394,"position":0},"title":"An Open Letter to Steve Jobs","date":"August 23, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"You have to laugh. Yesterday I received a mail-shot from Apple Frustrated with your PC? Time for a Mac.In the past 30 days has your PC:A. CrashedB. FrozenC. Made you want to pummel your screen with a sledgehammerD. All of the aboveIt just works. Another great reason to own a\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 28 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":883,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/15\/windows-orion-numbers\/","url_meta":{"origin":1394,"position":1},"title":"Windows ORION Numbers","date":"January 15, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Prompted by Jeff Moss' blog, I decided to use ORION to measure the performance of various I\/O configurations I'm testing for the upcoming Hotsos presentation. I've already blogged about the Linux results on a couple of configurations but I'm still tempted to include a Windows Laptop test (although I haven't\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 2 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1452,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/04\/c-j-date-in-edinburgh\/","url_meta":{"origin":1394,"position":2},"title":"C. J. Date in Edinburgh","date":"October 4, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"With the help of Oracle as sponsors, Peter Robson has organised a new seminar with Chris Date in Edinburgh on 10-12th of November. The format of \"A Relational Approach to SQL\" will be two days of tutorial-like presentation from Date, followed by a Wednesday morning of discussion and debate. It\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":933,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2005\/10\/17\/ansi-join-syntax\/","url_meta":{"origin":1394,"position":3},"title":"ANSI Join Syntax","date":"October 17, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 20 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":885,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/09\/that-damn-kyte\/","url_meta":{"origin":1394,"position":4},"title":"That Damn Kyte!","date":"January 9, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"It's all too believable. Sitting in my Inbox is this mail to myself on 19th Dec with a list of future Blog ideasYahoo Mail Beta and MetalinkSage, Tatung Einstein and a nice website :-http:\/\/www.old-computers.com\/museum\/computer.asp?c=607&st=1http:\/\/www.old-computers.com\/museum\/computer.asp?c=647&st=1http:\/\/www.old-computers.com\/museum\/computer.asp?st=1&c=86 I thought I might get round to these when the holidays were over (I was trying\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 1 comment","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1691,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2012\/10\/14\/parallel-dml-and-odp-net\/","url_meta":{"origin":1394,"position":5},"title":"Parallel DML and ODP.Net","date":"October 14, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been doing a lot of work around large volume data loads into an Oracle 11.2 database recently using External Tables and Parallelism and, despite the fact it's all used well-known techniques, I think it's probably worth a couple of posts to re-emphasise how successful using the right tools for\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 2 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1394\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}