New generation Developers and Google

Why re-invent the wheel "Google" it seems to be the mantra of developers these days,while i acknowledge the benefits of search-engines but when it comes to people doing "copy-paste" development i am all for stopping these searches.

Developers these days have stopped reading Manuals and good books and "Googling" cannot be a substitute to reading manuals .

Feature request on sqldeveloper

My feature request on sqldeveloper seems to be getting some votes http://htmldb.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=42626:39:3668166922413636::NO::P39_ID:461

although i later found out how to convert case via accelerators let's see if the request gets accepted the one request that has been accepted of creating connection groups is going to be real useful

Jonathan Lewis explains...

..what can happen if one starts using scripts from the internet w/o enough qulaity check.
Read his article :http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/kiddy_scripts.html

I got RTFM'ed

I got RTFM'ed when today i requested for select access on V$ objects in the development enviroment.

Tried all means to convince my dba but he would'nt budge and asked me to read documentation on v$sql .

I have given up for now......no point in banging my head on the ancient mind-block wall.....

Code Name God

Read this book recently by Dr Mani Bhaumik , i am fond of autobiographies and this one with details about Dr Bhaumik's spiritual quest is intriguing his directions on how to start on the path of meditation are precise and coming from his own experience offer advice as a mentor to anyone who is a beginner in meditation techniques.

Impact of SOA on Data Warehousing

Was reading a white-paper from OAGIS on the concept of business integration software ; this led me to think about the possible impacts on data warehousing in terms of integration , federation and what Lou Agosta referred to as the Virtual Data Warehouse ( i believe this was in a article on dmreview.com)
Dan Linstedt has a very clear thoughts on this and in his article featured in Terdata Magazine he makes certain crucial observations "

• Can your organization agree on the services that you need-for customers, for partners, for your internal organizations?
• Can you agree on what parts of those services require access to data that is or should be stored in your enterprise data warehouse?
• As for active data warehouses, can you agree on what key business events should cause the enterprise data warehouse to kick off an automated business workflow? "

He contends that SOA will make it easier and faster to develop decision support applications.
I concur with his thoughts but at the same time one must look at the fact SOA is a concept and at the core of which lies the fact of standard definitions , processes , systems. I believe that these kind of enterprise-wide integration efforts will only be successful when sufficient time , effort , money , active senior management support is available to get a solid foundation of common definitions and DW architects will have to be fight a lonely battle for quite sometime and be the change-drivers in organizations.

French law could affect the music-download industry

"France is pushing through a law that would force Apple Computer Inc to open its iTunes online music store and enable consumers to download songs onto devices other than the computer maker's popular iPod player."

This is great news for people who find the iPod a tad expensive...

Nurturing your business assets

Michael Meltzer makes a significant point that most marketing organizations miss when using technology to establish a dialog with their customers that of : "customers are not just targets but your business assets that you need to nurture.." Bravo ! I hope Marketing people lift their head out of the CURARE -pit to read this ( "The cross-sell, up-sell, retention, acquisition, reactivation and experience (CURARE) approach" )

Read the full article here

The Marketing Funnel

Jim Lenskold in his article on darwinmag mentions a key point on marketing ROI and that of "influencing prospective customers all the way through the buyers’ funnel, where in the funnel do they fail to progress, and what are the strengths and weaknesses in the core strategy?"
Reading this along with Seth Godins concept of flipping the funnel is the way to got for CMO's who wish to grow the market share