Tim Hall

I read a story last week called McDonald’s Tackles Repair of ‘Broken’ Service. As I came out of the cinema turned into a drive through to give it a shot and see what it was like. In this case the service was fine, but the food. OMG!

Now I’m a vegetarian, so choice is a little limited, but people who know me know that I’m not a fussy eater. I will pack pretty much anything into my mouth, which is why my waistline is rather ample…

I got some fries, which were OK. I figure you can’t get too much wrong with fries unless they are cold. They were warmish, so that wasn’t so bad. The rather large amount of salt saved them. I don’t tend to add salt to any of my food, so the odd super-salty food feels like a blood pressure busting treat. It kinda went downhill from there.

The vanilla shake tasted like it was made of plastic. There was nothing remotely dairy about the taste. Added to that, the cup was only 3/4 full. On second thoughts, the lack of product was a bonus here because it tasted rank.

The really nasty stuff started when I got my Spicy Veggie Sandwich. The bread was made out of rubber. The spicy veggie patty tasted like damp carpet that someone had dropped a jar of chili powder on. It contained salad that must have been a day old, then there was this slimy mush all over it that I can only assume was dredged up from a sewer. Needless to say that made a quick detour to my kitchen bin…

So looking back on that article about the service at McDonald’s, I think there is a much bigger problem than service here. The problem, from my limited experience, is the food is complete muck. Sort that out and you will go a long way toward turning things around!

Cheers

Tim…

McDonald’s : Is service really your biggest problem? was first posted on April 17, 2013 at 11:45 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

Just got back from watching Oblivion…

I was a little bit reluctant about going to see it because the trailer looked awesome, which these days tends to mean the film is terrible. Fortunately that wasn’t the case here. The film was great. Visually fantastic, with a pretty good story. Why can’t we have a few more Sci-Fi films like this?

As far as the trailers go, Iron Man 3 looks cool and the new Star Trek film looks very interesting. Maybe I’ll get my cinema mojo back after all…

Cheers

Tim…

Oblivion… was first posted on April 17, 2013 at 11:12 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

Assuming my current WordPress prefix was “wp_” and I wanted to change it to “banana_”, then I would do the following…

Take a backup of your database and file system. Remember, if you screw up and trash your blog you will thank yourself for the extra time you spent doing this!

Amend the “$table_prefix” setting in the “wp-config.php” file.

$table_prefix = 'banana_'; // Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!

Rename all the tables, swapping the “wp_” prefix with “banana_”. For example, the following statement would rename the “wp_comments” table to “banana_comments”.

RENAME TABLE wp_comments TO banana_comments

Perform the following updates.

UPDATE banana_options SET option_name = 'banana_user_roles' WHERE option_name = 'wp_user_roles'
UPDATE banana_usermeta SET meta_key = 'banana_capabilities' WHERE meta_key = 'wp_capabilities'
UPDATE banana_usermeta SET meta_key = 'banana_user_level' WHERE meta_key = 'wp_user_level'
UPDATE banana_usermeta SET meta_key = 'banana_autosave_draft_ids' WHERE meta_key = 'wp_autosave_draft_ids'

If you don’t do these updates, the blog will work, but when you try to access the admin site you will be greeted with a message saying,

You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.

That’s it!

Cheers

Tim…

How to Change the WordPress Table Prefix was first posted on April 14, 2013 at 10:36 am.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

VirtualBox 4.2.12 has just been released. The downloads and changelog are in the usual places.

Happy upgrading!

Cheers

Tim…

VirtualBox 4.2.12… was first posted on April 13, 2013 at 2:32 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

VirtualBox 4.2.12 has just been released. The downloads and changelog are in the usual places.

Happy upgrading!

Cheers

Tim…

VirtualBox 4.2.12… was first posted on April 13, 2013 at 2:32 am.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

I recently did the technical review of some of the chapters in a new Packt book called Managing Multimedia and Unstructured Data in the Oracle Database by Marcelle Kratochvil. I’ve known Marcelle for years and although we don’t always see eye-to-eye on DBA matters, she is definitely the first person I speak to about matters concerning multimedia and Oracle databases. A number of people “talk the talk”, but Marcelle is one of the few people that can actually “walk the walk” on this subject!

If you are interested in getting a free e-copy of this book, Packt Publishing are organizing a give away. All you need to do is leave a comment on this post telling me why you think you deserve a copy and what you hope to achieve after reading it. In 2 weeks (approximately 26-April-2013) I’ll read and judge the responses and make sure an e-copy of the book gets to the 4 lucky winners. I’ll be contacting the winners by email, so you will have to use your real email address when you comment!

I’m not going to reveal my judging criteria, and I’ll probably ask Marcelle to help me decide, so try and be a little creative in your answers. Just asking for a copy is not going to make you a winner.

Let the games begin…

Cheers

Tim…

Note. Comments on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ will not be judged. Your entry must be a comment on this blog post.

Win A Free Copy of Packt’s Managing Multimedia and Unstructured Data in the Oracle Database e-book was first posted on April 12, 2013 at 8:41 am.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

Heretics of Dune is the fifth book in the Dune series by Frank Herbert.

This book picks up the story 1,500 years after the last one ended. The descendants of Siona had scattered throughout the universe, hidden from prescient minds by their unique genetics traits. Now some of them return from the scattering, but for what purpose?

The first book in the series is what drew me in. The next couple of books were not great. The fourth was a lot better. This one continues the upward trend. The intensity builds pretty much from the start all the way through, but the ending is a little weak. The next book starts where this one left off, so I guess that’s the reason for the week ending in this case.

As with the previous books, there are some fantastic sound bites. When you are reading the books on a Kindle you can see the pages littered with other people’s highlights. I could list hundreds, but here are just a few.

 

“Quite naturally, holders of power wish to suppress “wild” research. Unrestricted questing after knowledge has a long history of producing unwanted competition.”

“Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?”

“… we only hate what’s really dangerous to us.”

Cheers

Tim…

Heretics of Dune was first posted on April 6, 2013 at 3:24 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

Followers of the blog know I’m an Oracle database guy, but my current job also has me honing my newbie WebLogic 11g skills, setting up a number of servers to deliver ADF and Forms & Reports 11gR2 applications.

As you’ve no doubt heard, Oracle have just released the 11.1.1.7.0 version of JDeveloper and ADF. I tried applying the 11.1.1.7.0 patch to a WebLogic 11g (10.3.6) installation and it worked without any problems (see here).

The real issue is, we currently have developers working hard to get applications converted from AS10g to ADF (11.1.1.6) running on WebLogic 11g (10.3.6). As much as I would like to “force” them to upgrade to 11.1.1.7, it has to be justified. So why should we upgrade to JDeveloper & ADF 11.1.1.7.0?

One of the great things about the Oracle ACE program is the level of access you get to experts in a variety of Oracle technologies. This network of people includes both Oracle ACEs and Oracle employees.

So how did I go about answering my question? Simple! I emailed my buddy Chris Muir (Oracle ADF Product Manager at Oracle), who is far better qualified to answer than me. In that email I asked the following three questions:

1. Assuming we don’t need the extra functionality in ADF 11.1.1.7, what is the advantage of moving to it? Are the bug fixes and maybe browser compatibility changes enough to warrant the upgrade?
2. Is there a significance as far as support lifecycle is concerned?
3. Is the upgrade likely to break anything that has already been converted for 11.1.1.6?

I suggested Chris might want to write a blog post based on these questions. He suggested a remote Q&A style post, so this is the “Q” and Chris will supply the “A” here!

Cheers

Tim…

Not “how”, but “why” should we upgrade to JDeveloper & ADF 11.1.1.7.0 ? was first posted on April 3, 2013 at 10:02 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

I mentioned in a previous post that my company were planning to move all of our middle tier infrastructure and some of our Oracle databases to Oracle Linux running on a virtual infrastructure. That process is now underway.

Persuading the company to ditch Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in favor of Oracle Linux took a bit of effort, partly due to some Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) spread by one of the vendors we use. In the process of trying to counter the FUD I put together an Oracle Linux FAQ document. I thought it might come in handy for anyone else in a similar position, so I thought I would make it available on my site.

• Oracle Linux : Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
  

As I say at the top of the article, this includes some of my opinions as well as facts. This made me a little nervous, so I thought I would run it by an expert before I let it loose.  Big thanks to Lenz Grimmer for giving the article the once-over. His corrections and suggestions were very welcome!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Linux : Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)… was first posted on April 2, 2013 at 11:20 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

Following on from my post about the ACE program, Yuri from Pythian asked what I get out of presenting that makes it worthwhile. In this post I will tell a few little stories to explain why I think writing and presenting are important skills for people, regardless of their ambitions.

Presenting

I mentioned in the previous post that I was originally scared of public speaking. There are only two reactions to that. You either avoid it, or face it head-on. In my case I chose the latter and it worked for me. I’m now really comfortable speaking to large groups of people. It’s always a bit nervy, but in a good way. At UKOUG last year I got up on stage and I could see my hands were shaking, so I pointed it out to the crowd and laughed at myself. Once I acknowledged the fear, I felt pretty calm and got on with it. The confidence to accept this sort of thing only comes if you put yourself through the ringer a few times. Preparation makes life alot easier, but no amount of practicing in your house can truly prepare you for the first time you get on stage.

If you do your preparation well, you will learn a lot more about your subject area. I spend a lot of time looking at what I am presenting and trying to think about the questions people are likely to ask me. If I come across anything I can’t answer in a convincing manner, I hit the books to find out what the answer is. There are always a few surprises, but you can incorporate those into your presentations to improve them over time.

In a similar vein, learning how to explain things to other people teaches you a lot about your subject. When you have to think of multiple approaches to explain a subject, you often gain more clarity yourself.

“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.” – Aristotle

There are pivotal moments in your life when being able to communicate clearly and calmly can have a big impact. I was speaking to some University students a few months back and asked how many of them had done formal presentations. The answer was pretty much zero. So then I posed the question, how do you think you are going to cope in a job interview if you’ve never actually put yourself under that sort of pressure before? I’m not saying presenting in front of your peers or at a conference will make you an interview demon, but these skills are transferable and they will help.

Likewise, when you are in a meeting and you have to present your arguments for following a specific route, if you babble inanely I doubt you will get the result you want. Communicating your thoughts and ideas in a clear manner is a skill everyone needs. Being able to communicate with people of differing technical backgrounds is a great skill too. It allows you to be the glue that binds the teams together. There is nothing worse than working in a company where all the teams are cool, but the interfaces between them are broken.

Above all, when you’ve done a good presentation you are on such a high. You feel like skipping out of the room.

Writing

I think everyone should write. Not just technical people, but everyone. I never kept a diary as a kid, but on reflection I wish I had. You don’t need to write fancy prose. Not every article has to been 50 pages long. It’s about ordering your thoughts. You don’t have to make them available on the internet, but I think it helps if you do.

I remember the first time I answered a question on a forum. It was dbasupport.com. I must have reread my answer about 20 times. I read the relevant pages in the documentation several times, making sure I’d not made a mistake. I hit submit and then refreshed the page every few seconds waiting to see if someone would criticise my answer. It was terrifying. The point is, putting your content out for public consumption opens you up to criticism, so you try a bit harder. I recently got one of my colleagues to start blogging. He kept his notes as word documents on a memory stick. In transferring stuff to his blog he commented on how scrappy some of his notes were and how putting them on his blog was forcing him to neaten things up. How many times have to looked back at scrappy notes and found them pretty much useless?

I’ve got 12+ years of notes to fall back on. You ask me to do anything, chances are the first thing I will do is read my article on that subject as a refresher. If it doesn’t fill in all the gaps, I’ll add to it. The fact I can rely on my notes is a big confidence boost for me. Without them I would be winging through the manuals desperately hoping I can find the right bit before I make a fool of myself.

If career progression is your thing, ask yourself this question. If you were an employer and you were faced with two candidates of equal ability and one maintained a blog with regular posts of a technical nature and the other didn’t, which would you pick? I would pick the blogger, just because they showed an extra level of enthusiasm for the subject. I would find that an attractive quality in a candidate.

I don’t think your career should be your main motive though. Most of my employers, including my current one, haven’t had a clue about my website when I’ve been hired. My colleagues tend to catch on over time when I follow up every answer to a question with a link to oracle-base.com.

OK. So it’s a bit of a raggedy post, but it gives you some idea of why I think presenting and writing are important and what I get out of them. The fact that occasionally people will give you good feedback or make you part of a community program is a nice bonus.

Cheers

Tim…

Everyone should write/present because… was first posted on April 2, 2013 at 5:34 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

I tweeted the following yesterday,

“It’s 7 years ago today that I was made an Oracle ACE. Seriously. It was April Fools Day 2006… ”

The followup from that tweet included a number of questions about what you get out of becoming an Oracle ACE and what is the quickest way to become one. In my mind, these types of questions highlight the misunderstanding of what the Oracle ACE program is. You can hear Vikki, Debra, Alex and myself talking about the Oracle ACE program here, but I feel like I want to clarify a few things. This is just my opinion. Others may say different.

Should you aim to become an Oracle ACE?

IMHO No! You should try to get involved in the Oracle community. If you enjoy that experience, keep on doing it and eventually you may be nominated and accepted as an Oracle ACE. If you don’t enjoy being involved in the community, then there is little chance you will do enough to warrant being nominated and accepted into the program.

The community contributions of the ACEs are assessed each year and as a result people drop out of the program. You can’t just do a quick spurt of blogging and hope to wing your way into the program, only to kick back and think you are sorted for life. That’s not how it works. Writing, presenting and answering questions on forums takes a lot of time. If you don’t enjoy it, you will not continue to contribute over a long period of time.

Does being an Oracle ACE mean you are an Oracle guru?

No. It is basically a pat on the back from Oracle for all your contributions to the community. Some of the ACEs are completely awesome and will melt your brain when they get going. Others like myself are just regular DBAs and Developers that like spreading what we’ve learned over the years. The ACE program is not a certification. It is not proof of ability. It is not a natural progression from OCP to OCM to ACE. If you think that, you’ve completely misunderstood what it is all about.

There are some awesome DBAs and Developers out there who you will never hear of. Why? Because they don’t enjoy putting themselves out there. If you are that type of person, then why make yourself miserable, just to try and become an Oracle ACE?

What do you get out of being an Oracle ACE?

You don’t need to be an Oracle ACE to get most of the benefits of being an Oracle ACE. It is the process you go through that provides most of the benefits, not the program itself…

The Oracle ACE program is great for networking. You meet lots of really cool people and make friends with many of them. That circle of people contains a great wealth of information. Having said that, because we are all involved in the community, almost all of us are directly accessible by you. If you show an active interest in a specific subject area, you will probably get in to regular conversations (online) with the Oracle ACEs in that area, as well as many other people.

Presenting is a skill *everybody* should have. At school I found it almost impossible to read out loud in front of people. My head would spin and I would panic. I could chat in groups of people, but anything that was even remotely formal was a nightmare. My experiences of presenting during my PhD weren’t much better. When I started working in IT I found the work environment fine, but put me in a meeting and ask me to introduce myself to the people around the table and a part of me would die inside. The reason for saying this is to highlight that presenting was not a natural thing for me. It was only after being made an Oracle ACE that I felt I should do some presenting. Like most newbies I was terrified and the added pressure of being labelled an Oracle ACE did not help. Fortunately, I got some good advice from some great speakers along the way, which helped a lot. What was the knock-on effect of this? I now find it easy to speak in meetings and interviews. Presenting is still a little nerve wracking, but it is fun also. You don’t need to be an Oracle ACE to get this benefit. Start presenting to your colleagues. Try and present at a local Special Interest Group (SIG). Try ToastMasters. You don’t have to present to 1000 people at OpenWorld to get the benefits of the confidence this gives you. The ACE program was the nudge I needed to do this, but for others user group participation was the factor that influenced them.

I feel like if you are looking for what the Oracle ACE program will give you, you’ve kind of missed the point.

Conclusion

Being part of the Oracle ACE program has been a very positive thing for me. I will remain in the program as long as it exists and as long as they will have me. What’s really important is, if the program were to end tomorrow, I would still keep doing what I do. If you see the Oracle ACE program as a goal for you to achieve, then I don’t think the program is what you think it is.

It’s just my opinion.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Jeff Smith just pointed me at this. Seems someone else was admitted to an evangelist program on April 1st too and was equally prompted to write on the subject. Kinda freaky to say the least!

Should you aim to become an Oracle ACE? was first posted on April 2, 2013 at 1:11 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

I’ve just wasted quite a bit of time trying to figure out why one of my VirtualBox VMs wasn’t starting properly, so I thought I would share the experience here in case anyone else has a similar issue…

It all started because I decided to fire up an OL6 VM, that I hadn’t used for a little while. It started up fine and I figured I should probably patch the OS and the VirtualBox Guest Additions. The first thing I did was a “yum update” to bring it up to OL6.4 and the the latest UEK2. Once that was complete I did a reboot and that is where the issue started. The VM booted in the normal fashion, but then hung at this point.

I was able to SSH to the VM, so I knew it wasn’t a complete disaster, but something was definitely wrong.

I tried an interactive startup, just to see if the main part of the startup was actually OK, as the white bar suggests. Sure enough, everything started as expected, then just hung after the last prompt.

Next, I started up in single user mode. That went fine, so I switched to full user mode using “init 3″. That was also went OK. Rather than doing “init 5″ I just typed “startx”, which produced a big pile of garbage. So X was mangled, but I wasn’t getting kicked back to the prompt.

Before embarking on a mission to fix X I decided to upgrade the VirtualBox Guest Additions. That removed the old 4.2.6 version and installed the 4.2.10 version. Once complete I rebooted and everything worked fine.

Normally I try to keep my Linux kernels and VirtualBox Guest Additions up to date, but even when I’ve let VMs like this fall by the wayside I’ve not encountered this before.

Anyway, I can chalk that up to experience.

Cheers

Tim…

Why is my VirtualBox VM not starting properly? was first posted on March 29, 2013 at 3:46 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

In a previous post I said that UltraEdit moves through beta really quickly. Today I’m rocking UltraEdit v4.0 Release Candidate on Fedora 18…

Cheers

Tim…

UltraEdit for Linux/Mac v4.0 Release Candidate… was first posted on March 29, 2013 at 11:16 am.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

Last year I wrote an article about the installation of Oracle Forms and Reports Services 11gR2 on Oracle Linux 5. I’ve now written the article for Oracle Forms and Reports Services 11gR2 on Oracle Linux 6. The latest patch of F&RS is certified for OL6, along with JDK6 and JDK7.

In addition to the installation articles, I’ve compiled a collection of random notes about post-installation configuration into a separate article. I keep adding to it every time I come across a new (for me) issue.

I’m hoping this will stop me falling into the trap I did with AS10g, where I didn’t write down any of this stuff, assuming I would remember it, only to find I couldn’t remember Jack a few years later.

Cheers

Tim…

 

Oracle Forms and Reports Services 11gR2 on Oracle Linux 6… was first posted on March 23, 2013 at 2:45 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

Hot on the heels of the recent UltraEdit v19 release for Windows, comes the UltraEdit v4 Beta II release for Linux/Mac.

I’ve just started using it and so far so good. They usually progress through the betas pretty quick. I didn’t have time to install the beta I before this one dropped.

Cheers

Tim…

UltraEdit for Linux/Mac v4.0 Beta II was first posted on March 23, 2013 at 9:29 am.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

Were you thinking, “I’ve got nothing better to do this weekend than to download the latest version of VirtualBox and update the guest additions on all my VMs”? Well your luck is in!

Oracle have just released VirtualBox 4.2.10. The downloads and changelog are in the usual places.

Happy upgrading!

Cheers

Tim…

VirtualBox 4.2.10… was first posted on March 15, 2013 at 8:50 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

The internet has been awash with people bemoaning the decision by Google to close Google Reader. Probably the next biggest talking point has been people asking what they can use to replace it when it’s gone. I’m planning on giving TheOldReader.com a test-drive, once I can get my feeds imported.

The problem with free

This highlights one of the problems with free stuff. It’s not (always) really free. Google spent a few years building stuff, some of which was pretty cool, and most of which was free, but sooner or later they needed to find a way to monetize this stuff. That’s one thing that never happened with Reader, so not surprisingly it joined the growing list of things that have been cleaned away to make room for the more profitable stuff. It’s a pity Google didn’t first ask people if they were willing to pay a fee to keep the service. Like many others, I would have been willing to pay for the privilege of retaining it.

The problem with RSS

It also suggests that RSS was never really that popular. It’s easy when you are a tech-blogger to think the whole world reads blogs and cares about RSS, but the truth is most people just don’t give a crap. I use RSS to keep on top of things going on in the industry. If I relied on Twitter, Google+ or Facebook I would miss out on loads of things because the UK timezone doesn’t really fit with the vast majority of publishing in my chosen profession. Also, the signal:noise ratio of my RSS feeds is much better than that of most social media channels I subscribe to. So being one of the vast minority of people that actually do care about RSS has left me in a bad situation.

I’m interested to hear any thoughts on ways of ridding myself of RSS, or any other tools you’ve seen that might help me out of my current predicament.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: I’ve decided on feedly.com for the moment.

 

 

 

 

The problem with free and RSS… was first posted on March 14, 2013 at 9:47 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

For all those folks who are forced to use Windows, you might be interested to know UltraEdit v19 has just been released.

You can check out the new features here.

The latest version for Mac/Linux is still 3.3, so maybe we are due a new version there too?

Cheers

Tim…

UltraEdit v19 for Windows was first posted on March 14, 2013 at 4:00 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

When you read the term “Total Cost of Ownership” (TCO), the word “Total” is pretty important!

Here is a paraphrased conversation I had recently…

• Person: Product X is free!
• Myself and others: The staff training costs to enable the long term support of product X, are not free though. Added to that, these people still have to support products Y and Z, so you are adding to their workload. You might even have to add people to the existing team, so the TCO may be far from free.
• Person: But the product is free!

You can see where this is going.

I love free software. I use it alot. There is loads of great free software out there. The problem is, many people focus so much on the price tag they forget to factor in what this really means in terms of total cost of ownership. Depending on the product and the company culture, the cost of training associated with a product shift may be more than the licensing costs of your existing products. As a result, you may see a short term increase in costs, followed by a reduction in costs over time. The point is, blindly saying “Product X is free!” is incredibly naive.

So next time you are discussing the cost of something, don’t forget the word “total” in TCO.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. The conversation was not about Oracle products, so this isn’t a case of me trying to justify Oracle license costs.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) : The clue is in the name! was first posted on March 11, 2013 at 10:30 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.

God Emperor of Dune is the fourth book in the Dune series by Frank Herbert.

After the randomness of the previous book, this fourth one was a lot more on-the-money. There are a number of scenes in the book I really hooked into, including one I blogged about a few days ago. It’s far from perfect, but it kept me interested. Probably the worst part of the book was then ending, which was rather lackluster.

I’m looking forward to see if this direction continues into the next book.

Cheers

Tim…

God Emperor of Dune… was first posted on March 10, 2013 at 6:29 pm.
©2012 "The ORACLE-BASE Blog". Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement.