RE: From ORACLE-L to DATABASE-L?
- From: Jamey Johnston <jj@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "tim.evdbt@xxxxxxxxx" <tim.evdbt@xxxxxxxxx>, "oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2018 10:08:00 -0500
I can echo what Tim is saying as a cross pollinator myself!
- jbj2
---------------------------------------------
Jamey Johnston
@STATCowboy
STATCowboy.com
jj@xxxxxxxxxx
From: Tim Gorman
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2018 9:58 AM
To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: From ORACLE-L to DATABASE-L?
So, of course, I ask Oracle people about it. :)
This thread is a good argument for expanding ORACLE-L to DATABASE-L.
There is a vibrant technical community in SQL Server and it is long past time
that these communities cross-pollinated better.
As this thread shows, it isn't that one or the other DBMS is better, but they
can be different in subtle ways which can trip up even the most experienced of
us.
And, as this thread shows, many of us are tasked with administering both DBMS
packages, in addition to PostgreSQL and MySQL.
I'm proud to cite my wife, Kellyn, as an example of this breed of renaissance
geek, as she is currently president of both the Rocky Mountain Oracle Users
Group and of the Denver SQL Server users group, and she is likely soon to
become the first person in the world to achieve both Oracle ACE Director (now
alumnae) and Microsoft MVP recognition.
One noticeable difference between the two communities is age. On average,
Kellyn and I find attendees at SQL Server users group events to be about 10
years younger than Oracle users group events, based on unscientific eyeball
observation. Also, the SQL Server users group community has a much larger
percentage of women attendees and speakers (i.e. about 40% for SQL to about 20%
for Oracle).
As a result, while the ORACLE-L list has been yakking along happily here on
email for the past 20 years, the SQL Server community has been largely
conversing on Twitter. Both communities blog at about the same rate and volume
(in my opinion), and both communities seem to use LinkedIn to the same degree
(in my opinion). So, the biggest difference in online communication style
seems to be email vs tweets.
So, if we were to go through the effort of changing from ORACLE-L to DATABASE-L
(leaving aliases from ORACLE-L to point to DATABASE-L so folks can still find
us), we would find adoption by the SQL Server community to be slow, because
they would have a struggle paying attention to, and responding to, a
high-volume email list. There are undoubtedly good ways to integrate email and
Twitter, and I'm sure they can be quite seamless, but the first question is:
what do y'all think?
How do you personally feel about discussing and learning about SQL Server as
well as Oracle? Would it enhance your prospects?
On 3/15/18 07:23, Rich J wrote:
On 2018/03/15 07:34, Jeff Smith wrote:
Brent is a friend and an ex-coworker. He wanted to share the background of this
customer's scenario, in case it would help you with yours.
I let Brent know some folks were having...fun...with his take on autocommit.
Jeff
Heh heh heh, I can only imagine. The difference on optimistic vs pessimistic
concurrency nailed it though - the default combo of optimistic & implicit
transactions makes sense in Oracle, and the default of pessimistic and
automatic transactions makes sense in SQL Server. It's when you change only one
of those two settings that you're screwed.
The blog post stemmed from an app that had been written by SQL Server people,
and then an Oracle guy came in and made a few changes. He switched to implicit
transactions without understanding that everybody was doing single-line
inserts/updates all over the place in code, not bothering to set transactions.
He didn't understand the impact of what he was doing. (Not an Oracle jab by any
means - the guy was well-meaning but just not prepared.)
We got called in because performance went straight into the toilet. Even worse,
rollbacks were rolling back completely unrelated transactions, and nobody knew
why, hahaha.
Ah, that context adds a lot to the assertion. I still disagree that autocommit
is a good practice for applications, whether it's Oracle or SQL Server, but I
understand where Brent's coming from.
And my intent wasn't to have "fun", but a sanity check for myself. IT changes
constantly outside of my narrow focus, and as I've been following Brent's blog
for years, that entry offers an opinion that is completely backwards of my
understanding of how any modern RDBMS should work.
So, of course, I ask Oracle people about it. :)
Thanks all for the sanity check!
Rich
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