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 would 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 biased 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,hing 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 why 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 technologist, 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 in this post)… Anyway, 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 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 it 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 very useful is this: giving the solution to a rather troubling particular situation I might currently be 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 Oracle Corporation has a support team, and if you are a licensed customer with an account, you can contact them for help with 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 10, they first need to replicate it. Given that you need help solving that issue, you 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 for information back and forth before even getting to a resolution. For my more trivial issues, I mostly resort to asking well-phrased questions that can be easily answered, and I go on to continue my work. The same is true for when you go on any platform, Stack Exchange, DBA Stack Exchange, or Twitter, just wherever a forum you go and ask a question, whoever has to answer must get some 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 same problem than to go back and forth, scrubbing out parts of your data to send off-site, 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 gotten invaluable information out of it. There is, of course, one caveat to getting information off blogs, and that is, how do you know which ones to trust? I must admit this is quite troubling, because while you want a quick answer/solution to your problem, you also want a reliable solution 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 are ASKTOM, ORACLE-BASE, and thatjefffsmith.com, to name a few. These Blogs are all written by seasoned Oracle professionals who, at some point in their career, actually worked at Oracle. That is one of the first things I do when I look up any new blog: I check the writer’s portfolio, and if they have ever worked at Oracle, I automatically give them 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 is: you do not have to! And even from seasoned pros, you should always test anything you get from a blog thoroughly before running it in your production environment, and make sure you understand it. Furthermore, it’s worth noting 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 others’ blogs, and for every input those blogs have given me, maybe I could give even a little bit of output back to someone else.
No Problem should ever need to be solved twice!