“If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.”
Margaret Fuller.
Ah yes, nothing like a good quote to make a point. Before writing this I actually went looking around for a cool attention grabbing headline that will make everyone wanna read this blog post however This one stood out to me and I never had to take a second look at it; It was a very bias selection so to speak. If you’re wondering what about it makes it so special, well the answer is nothing really and although it does come across as a bit of “bloating” kind of a “hey look at me I got so much knowledge” You’ll be less than shocked to know that isn’t necessarily the case. I picked that particular line because it encapsulates, more than anything the effect or feeling I’ve got from reading other people’s Blogs rather than how much I have to share myself. In the following lines I will share with you the reasons for which I decided to start sharing whatever problems I’ve faced however minute they may be, hence “Why I started Blogging”
A few days ago, I was taking a walk while listening to Connor Mcdonald’s podcast The Spoken Nerd and in two episodes he mentioned a few lines that really spoke to me. PS if you are an oracle Technologists you really should be following this guy on your socials his youtube, twitter etc he shares a lot of invaluable info and tips about using the oracle database(Which is really making my point of this post)… Anyways yes he mentioned that ;
1) No problem should ever be solved twice
and
2) You never know how little you know until you meet that one person who just knows a little bit more than you
The above 2 lines really spoke to me and kind of sum up my experience of visiting other people’s blogs throughout my career. Let’s face it the oracle documentation can be daunting and inexhaustible, at least I find it so. Now I am not in any way saying that is not a good place to go for information, however I find that I use it for some things particularly general information stuff like syntax of a command, details of the columns of a data dictionary table, overview of a package and even them I sometimes filter to what is relevant to my particular use case. What I do not find it very useful for is this; Giving the solution to a rather troubling particular situation that I might be currently facing. More often than not you are not the first person to encounter an issue and you’re hoping someone somewhere has encountered something similar and has so generously taken the time to write about it and boom one google search points you to their blog and problem solved. One of my favorite blogs I tend to go to first is ORACLE-BASE, I like their style of writing and talking about features in a problem-solution type format, filtering down the massive information from the oracle documentation into much smaller, readable, digestible and applicable pieces that can be used to solve your day to day challenges.
I do recognize that the Oracle corporation have a support team and if you are a licensed customer with an account you can contact them for help on certain issues and someone will readily assist you. However, let’s face it for someone to fix your problem depending on the issue, 9 times out of ten they first need to replicate that issue. Given that you need help solving that issue you additionally may not even be sure of the root cause. What does it take to replicate your issue? A LOT. They basically need to replicate your entire environment, operating system, database structure, tables etc the list could go on and on. No discredit to the work the oracle technologists put in but most times I find it’s quite a lengthy process of asking information back and forth before even getting to some resolution. For my more trivial issues, I resort mostly to asking well phrased questions that could easily just be answered back and I go on to continue my work. The same is true for when you go on any platform stack exchange or DBA stack exchange or twitter just wherever forum you go and ask a question whoever has to answer must get some sort of clear understanding of all the moving parts and most likely replicate the issue before they can solve it. Moreover if you have an issue, something is wrong be it a critical thing affecting production or some bug in your sql you are developing it’s in your best interest more than anyone’s to get a quick resolution from a reliable source(will come back to this later). It’s always easier to go over the notes of someone who has faced and solved the exact same problem than going over and exchanging info back and forth, scrubbing out parts of your data to send offsite etc. Thus, when you think about it Blogs actually solve way more problems for a whole lot of people with the least amount of hassle.
When you Blog about something you may find it not very important to you but someone out there reading your blog might have got invaluable information out of it. There is of course one caveat to getting information off of blogs and that of course is how do you know which ones to trust. I must admit this is quite a troubling thing because while you want a quick answer/solution to your problem you also want a reliable solution coming from a reliable source. What do I do? over time I have managed to mark up a couple of blogs which I trust more than others At the very top of that list is ASKTOM and then ORACLE-BASE, thatjefffsmith.com to name a few. These Blogs are all written by seasoned oracle professionals who in at least one point of their career actually worked at oracle. That is one of the first things I do when I look up any new blog is try to look at the writer’s portfolio and if they have ever worked at oracle I automatically give a 60% trust score. Now if you’re reading this and obviously I have never been an employee of oracle myself thus far you’re going well why should we trust yours? Well that’s a good question and the only answer to that is You do not have to! and even from the seasoned pros, you should always test out anything you get from a blog thoroughly before running it in your production environment and make sure you have some sort of understanding on it. Furthermore it’s worthy of note that there are blogs out there written by non-oracle personnel that are indeed worth their weight in gold. So double check the info you’re getting and use your professional judgement before taking any advice from Blogs
So there you have it, that is the entire reason I am here; I believe that I have been helped countless times by the blogs of others and for every input those blogs have made to me maybe I could give even a little bit of output back to someone else.
No Problem should ever need to be solved twice!