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ODC Appreciation Day: Appreciating the Community

Thanks, Tim Hall, for launching the annual OTN Appreciation Day, now renamed to ODC Appreciation Day, since the Oracle Technology Network has been recently re-shaped into Oracle Developer Community!

Many "outside" Oracle technologists (not employed by Oracle) are publishing posts today about their favorite Oracle technologies. I have seen posts about index-organized tables, PL/SQL, SQL, pipelined table functions, SQL Developer, PL/SQL collections in SQL, and much, much more.

I could write a similar blog about my all-time favorite technology, PL/SQL, the best database programming language the world has ever seen.

But you all know that about me, and hopefully about PL/SQL, too.

And it seems a little, I don't know, self-serving for an Oracle employee to toot a horn about Oracle technology (OK, not self-serving: it is, after all, my job).

But since OTN has been renamed into Oracle Developer Community, I will take advantage of Tim's initiative to celebrate:

The Oracle Developer Community

Not the organization inside Oracle that has this name, but the actual, living, breathing, talking, sharing, complaining (constructively), coding, problem-solving, mentoring community of individual human beings who commit so much of their time, their hard-won expertise, their insights, to helping others.

Yes, Oracle technology is awesome and getting more awesome-er every single day.

Yes, Oracle is moving rapidly to the Cloud, autonomizing its database, giving developers of every shape and inclination the tools they need to do all the cool, modern stuff humans want to do.

But when it comes down to it, we can only succeed if there are millions of people around the world who love our stuff, who use our stuff, who help others user our stuff and get them to love it.

Fortunately, there are.

Without a doubt, in the coming years, hundreds of thousands of developers who have never used an Oracle product, and have perhaps harbored one or two negative thoughts about Oracle in the past, will come to know and appreciate our support for containers, microservices, open source frameworks, APIs and more.

But right now, all over the globe, millions of developers and DBAs make Oracle technology, and in particular Oracle Database, a successful foundation and cornerstone of countless numbers of applications.  And they play a critical role in making it possible for billions of humans to benefit from Oracle technology.

I am tempted to try to list all the individuals who play a leading role in this effort (Tim Hall so obviously comes to mind, as do all the Oracle ACEs and the brand-new Developer Champions). But that only means I will make those I leave off the list feel bad and it will imply that the countless Oracle technologies who don't necessarily blog, but play critical roles in their companies and "micro-communities" aren't as important.

So I will skip the list. I will give a big salute to everyone, but I will conclude with a special thanks to the Oracle Application Express user community, best exemplified by apex.world.

The APEX community is special.

First, the APEX tool demonstrates just how powerful SQL and PL/SQL are as foundations for application development - and in particular for building websites and mobile applications.

Second, the APEX community - first and foremost the actual users of APEX but also so critically the APEX dev team, which is itself an active part of that community - shows what a difference an enthused, engaged, excited bunch of users can make to the success of a technology and its users.

If "next gen" developers (struggling with Javascript frameworks, working hard to connect up all their microservices with our Cloud products, etc.) want to get a sense of how powerful and positive a community of developers can be in the Oracle ecosystem, they only have to check out the #orclapex Twitter hash tag.

The true measure of how successful Oracle is in building new developer communities will be how well those communities measure up to the astounding #orclapex community.

So:

1. Thank you, developers and DBAs and architects and analysts who use Oracle technology every day, and help others be successful with it!

2. Thank you, Tim Hall, for being such a great voice in the community and for launching this initiative every year!
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