By: Anibal

Anibal — Sun, 23 Aug 2015 07:50:56 +0000

Experience rarely comes from other peolpe’s mistakes. If we want the oracle community to grow and to grow smarter, we first have to get them out of the “I Suck phase” of Oracle development (“I Suck phase” borrowed from Kathy Sierra’s Create Passionate Users blog). I think its rare that anybody for any skill has ever learned much from reading. Sure, we can learn many “facts” that way, but we rarely get the “experience” that is crucial to the high end of the skill spectrum.For example: I’ve practiced martial arts for over 13 years and taught for 6 years. When someone new comes in, I could give them tons of pointers with explanations about every aspect of their movement doing any move. Guess what happens if I do that? Except for a glazed stare, nothing. What do I do? I tell them to lift their knee and kick with their shin. If they do that in front of me with a modicum of control (i.e. they’re not falling down), they get to kick a pad a few times to try it out. Guess who teaches most? Not me, its the pad. They’ll only listen to any advice I give if they feel they’ve “got” the new tools under their belt.How does this translate to Oracle, forums, Q&A, asktom, etc? The web information is the “master”, Oracle is the “pad”, and the web surfer is the “student”. If the student wants to learn, they’re going to seek out the information. Once they have enough information, they’ll go and kick the pad with the new information to see how it works. Yep, all that great advice you gave them won’t really sink in until they try it out in Oracle and experience some of the same successes and failures.As long as Edie moderates the Q&A to ensure that completely bad/wrong answers don’t show up (e.g. “To rename a column, log in as sys and change this sys table …”), his contribution will be a good tool for learning Oracle.

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By: Anibal