Some of you may have noticed the conspicuous absence of DBAzine for a bit, due to technical difficulties. Happy to report, though, that we are broadcasting live, again!

So, read on, rock on, and have a great week!

-- The Intrepid DBAzine Staff

We've heard it once (from Craig Mullins); we've heard it twice (from Chris Foot): It's time for DBAs to come out from behind their cubicle walls and into the corridors of the business ... for the good of their own careers. Do we believe? WE BELIEVE -- especially after reading an article and listening to a podcast, both featured this week, by longtime IMS expert and IT gadfly Peter Armstrong. Peter's article -- subtly titled "How Do I Keep My Job?" -- expands on the views of Craig and Chris and makes the case for, among other things, proactive learning about IT best practices as one way to better support business goals.

Are you ready to take Peter Armstrong's challenge and learn about best practices, to increase your value to your business? Beginning this month, DBAzine.com will periodically publish articles by experts on today's best practices, including Balanced Scorecard, CobIT, and of course, ITIL. Look for these in the Interest channel, post your questions, and let us know if you think these are helpful. We believe that in the 21st Century, business will become more competitive, IT will become more complex (remember when you heard that email would simplify professional life?), and the world will need IT professionals who not only know their technologies, but know their businesses, and are ready to help them succeed.

We've been glad to see that more DBAzine.com community members are utilizing the Comments feature on articles to ask questions and raise issues with those articles' authors. In a perfect world, all of the authors would respond to comments in a timely manner; however, most of these guys have (demanding) day jobs, so it may take time for them to notice the comment and post a reply. We'd like to encourage other DBAzine.com community members who read a comment on an article to share your own knowledge/opinions on the subject and to post a response as well. Sharing your expertise with somebody else might result in more discussion, questioning, learning, and ultimately, discovery of new ways to be a better DBA.

Lately, you may have noticed that we at DBAzine and Apress publishing company got our wires crossed. When we thought we were publishing chapter 3 from Tom’s latest book, we’d actually published chapter 3 from his Expert Oracle, Signature Edition: Programming Techniques and Solutions for Oracle 7.3 through 8.1.7, published in April 2005. (Confused? Well, let’s go on …)

That means, Tom Kyte’s “Locking and Concurrency,” articles, parts one, two, and three, were mislabeled when originally published (they have now been updated to show the correct source). But when everything was sorted out, the generous folks at Apress sent us an excerpt from Tom’s Sept. 2005 book, Expert Oracle Database Architecture: 9i and 10g Programming Techniques and Solutions, which will be published in five parts, starting this week with part one.

Well, mistakes happen … but thanks to Apress and Mr. Kyte, DBAzine readers will now enjoy reading excerpts from both of these essential Oracle books!

We’ve been made aware of a problem with the Comments feature on our articles. Thanks for your patience while we work to resolve this matter.

We received feedback that some parts of the podcast were difficult to hear. So Tom Parish went back and re-encoded the podcast to try to bring out Tom Kyte's voice. The phone Tom Kyte was on was a bit fuzzy but we think that the podcast sound quality is now better.

If you had trouble with the first version, you may want to listen to the improved podcast.

As always, we appreciate your feedback so we can continually improve this site!

Sorry for the on-going changes to the RSS feeds. As soon as had I posted the last blog entry, I realized that we could really pinpoint what topics are of interest by using a tracking service for more than just the RSS2 (iPod focused) feeds. So here are our current feeds. Please use them! (The RSS2 feed is unchanged.)

RSS

We've been having some trouble with the RSS feeds and I've made a few adjustments. Please go to the RSS on DBAzine page and make sure you have the latest feeds. I've removed all the search based feeds and replaced them with individual subject feeds. I'll keep you all posted here when we have the "all content" update feed back up.

If you are finding any errors in the RSS feeds, please contact technical support.

Archive by Author

Our Archive by Author page has been greatly expanded. We've added quite a few author names. This page will allow you to see at a glance all of the article content an expert has published on DBAzine.com.

It’s been said that there are not enough people in this world who love what they do for a living, but we’ve found one: Tom Kyte. The title of Tom’s day job is Vice President of the Core Technologies Group at Oracle Corporation, but you may know him better as a columnist for Oracle Magazine (that’s Tom, as in “Ask Tom”), author of the popular book, Expert One-on-One Oracle, and of the new book, Expert Oracle 9i and 10g Programming Techniques and Solutions, coming this fall from Apress. And now, in his “spare time,” he has started The Tom Kyte Blog, where he answers questions and talks about Oracle, and also talks about himself, his thoughts, and opinions.

How does he do all of this and still stay excited about databases in general, and about Oracle in particular? We wanted to know, and so DBAzine.com recently asked Tom this question, and more. We’ll air that podcast next week, and give away some of Tom’s books and excerpts from his forthcoming book, courtesy of Apress. So stay tuned, and thanks for being loyal members of our community!