User Group Leadership: A Path to Success in Life?

I met with Steve Lemme of the IOUG for a story on user groups in Oracle Magazine, but the written story died during the editorial process. However I taped the interview for my Up Close series and the video lives on! My Up Close series focuses on the Oracle user group community. Steve is a true believer in user groups. He believes that joining one can make you better at using the technology. He believes that being a leader in the community leads to personal growth and professional satisfaction. But enough of me talking. Watch Steve tell you himself.

"World Changing" Database?

“We’re living in the shadow of architectural decisions that were made decades ago... but all these architectural restraints have gone away...”
-- Terry Jones of Fluid Info.

When Scoble and O’Rielly call a new take on database technology “world changing,” I figure someone at Oracle should look into it. I would guess there are teams at Oracle thinking along these same lines, but I’m not sure exactly whom, so I shotgun this out to all. Here’s Scoble’s post with videos. Here’s the inventor’s blog. I’ll post something over at Oracle Mix to get the conversation started there.

How to Talk to Your Boss about REAL Analytics

Jeanne Harris, co-author of Competing on Analytics knocked me out with her keynote address at the Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, and Analytics (BIWA) Summit this week at the Oracle Conference Center.

I came away with an understanding of how analytics are being used by those who do it best. Her examples: Amazon, Harrah's casinos, and the Boston Red Sox have all “dominated their fields by deploying industrial-strength analytics across a wide variety of activities.”

The talk was not heavy on technical details (the rest of the summit would provide those). Instead it focused on giving IT people the language they need to discuss the power of analytics with upper management. I caught up with her after the keynote to ask her to repeat some of what she had said. (Her publisher won’t allow me to run video, so the window below will only play audio.)

A Map for the Post BEA Era

I stopped by Ted Farrell's keynote at Oracle Develop 2008 and heard him give an overview of Oracle's "go forward" dev tools strategy in the wake of the influx of great technology from BEA. Below is a key section of the talk:

Speak, Write, Win

If you look at the people that make it to Oracle ACE status, they aren’t just good at technology they are also comfortable speaking and writing about what they do. (I know because I’ve interviewed many of them.) My advice? Get serious about your writing skills (as in take a class) and get over your fear of speaking publicly (as in join a speakers group). Here are a couple of examples to show you (and me), how it’s done.

Here’s Tim O’Reilly helping his employees face the economic meltdown. It's a well thought out, well written blog post. His simple message: when things get tough be creative and do stuff that matters. Thanks to Scoble for leading me to this.

Seth Godin at Google pushing the ideas in his latest book. He speaks so well that you keep watching that little Web video to hear what he’s got to say.

Exadata: It really works!

For the past three months, I and a small group of people in the creative department at Oracle have been working in secret on the HP Oracle Database Machine that Larry just announced in his OpenWorld keynote. Our group has been writing scripts for demos and videos, designing branding elements, shooting photos, and art-directing Web and print pieces. But we had no access to any REAL information about how the product was doing in real-world tests.  

Then at an Oracle Magazine lunch on Tuesday I sat next to a beta participant for the Oracle Exadata Database Machine.  Once we had established that I was on the inside of the project, he shared a story that made me look forward to the announcement even more.

Without ever mentioning the product by name, the beta participant told me that the first time he used Exadata, he and his team thought they had made a mistake.  The query came back too fast. They spent two hours on the line with Oracle trying to fix the problem. But there was no problem; Exadata was simply faster than anything they had experienced before.

I look forward to watching the the development of this technology in the real-world.  And I’m glad the months of silence and code speak are behind us.

Mix Profile - Ode to Gus

A friend of mine is a magazine illustrator and when the editors want to publish his profile he often just jots down what he's eaten that day and maybe something about where he's been and sends it to them. It's often the most entertaining and informative profile in the magazine and I'll tell you why: you learn about people from the details of their lives and the small choices they make.

In every beginning fiction class students are asked to create a character by showing the reader small details about the characters life, "what's in his fridge?" the teacher will ask, "what kind of shoes does she wear?"

So in honor of Gus and my creative writing teachers, I wrote a new profile for Oracle Mix. (It's not as cool as the ones Gus writes because I do have specific information I am trying to impart to colleagues. )

Jeff Erickson eats oats and fruit every morning in the Oracle Plaza building and then sits down to write a story for the Database Insider or the Fusion Middleware newsletter. Or he might work on a news story for Oracle Magazine or on his Oracle community column, Up Close. Throughout the morning he will fret about updating his blog. Then it’s off to the gym at lunch where he straps on his shoes for a run along the bay with friends. Except on Wednesdays when he meets the Oracle Speakers group in Building 300. After downing a sandwich at his desk, he’ll spend the afternoon lining up interviews or writing scripts for Oracle Demos or for his new show, One Minute Oracle. Throughout the day Lawrence Leung peppers him with requests to review updates or write short tech features for Oracle.com. Then he hops on his bike for the trip home and frets a little more about updating his blog.

Update: The character count in the Oracle Mix profiles is quickly eaten up by html links, so you can't publish link heavy profiles like this one. I've asked them to fix this.