Obsessed with Oracle PL/SQL

A long, long time ago....I announced that I had been given the honor of assembling a team of evangelists, whose job would be to promote Oracle Database as an application development platform. In other words, make sure that current and future users fully leverage all the amazing features for developers that are baked into Oracle Database, such as SQL, PL/SQL, Oracle Text, Oracle Spatial, edition-based redefinition and more. I am very pleased to announce that my team has now swelled dramatically from one person (me) to four, with one more to come on board in early 2015. I will make a more "formal" announcement of our team and our plans in Q1 2015, but for now, I did want to share the joyful feeling I feel. Drum roll, please.... Todd Trichler, Community Manager Todd got his start at Oracle working with Partners in Alliances. For over a decade he has been focused on technology outreach, working closely with development to drive "grass-roots" engagements

If it's PL/SQL, I'm interested. And if it's PL/SQL involved in winning some sort of award, well, I am downright excited . So I was very pleased indeed to see that Tim Hall of Oracle-Base fame won the UK Best Speaker award at UKOUG 2014 for his talk on Improving the Performance of PL/SQL Function Calls from SQL . Tim is an engaging writer and speaker, but of course that's not while he won the award. It was because the topic he chose was so incredibly important and exciting. Still, I thought it would at least be polite to say to Tim: Congratulations, Tim! Keep up the great work! Tim is one of those Oracle experts (and an ACE Director to boot) who is incredibly generous with his time and knowledge, as anyone who has spent any time on Oracle-Base.com will know. He can also be quite hilarious, as you can tell from his recent blog post on UKOUG 2014 . Here are links to the slide deck, demo scripts and an article all focused on improving the performance of PL/SQ

I participated in an  Oracle Academy  Ask the Experts webcast in November 2014, with the title "The Code Under the Covers, aka the Database Under the App." The objective of the webcast was to encourage professors to teach, and students to learn, SQL (the Structured Query Language) and PL/SQL (Procedural Language extensions to SQL). In preparing for the talk, I found myself thinking about  Platonic Idealism . Strange, eh? So I thought I'd share some of these thoughts on my blog. I hope you find them interesting enough to share and comment. First, it is very much worth noting that while SQL is "old" - the first commercial SQL database was released by Oracle waaaay back in 1979 -  it's not going anywhere. In fact, it is getting more important than ever, more entrenched, and more widely used. And I think that part of the reason for the  stickiness of SQL has to do with the aforementioned  Platonic Idealism , or to be more precise, it has to do with how