As Published In July/August 2007

AT ORACLE: OTN Bulletin

Oracle's Winning Hand

By Justin Kestelyn

The Oracle ACE program celebrates its hundredth ACE.

In any high-stakes game, you can never have too many aces. Luckily for the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) community, the number of Oracle ACEs keeps growing. In fact, Oracle has recently drawn its hundredth Oracle ACE—China's Feng Chun Pei.

Feng is a typical Oracle ACE—a technologist who knows his stuff and is willing to share his experience. Feng's community leadership includes 19,000 posts to ITPUB, China's largest technical forum, and the authorship of more than a dozen technical articles and two Chinese-language books for Oracle DBAs.

As a technical instructor and resident expert at ITPUB, Feng teaches the finer points of Oracle system structure, backup and recovery, SQL optimization, and system performance. He also lectures at technology events held by Oracle and third-party groups and chairs "Oracle lovers" gatherings throughout China.

The Oracle ACE program seeks out and thanks expert contributors like Feng. His Oracle ACE award brings the total number of Asia Pacific ACEs to 17—a number that is expected to double in the coming years.

Attack of the Podcasts

Since the launch of OTN's podcasting initiative in 2005, podcasting has become a near-daily practice at Oracle. Whether you're a DBA, developer, business manager, or Oracle partner, there's a regular podcast show for you. (See oracle.com/podcasts for the full list.)

In the last six months, Linux aficionados, application architects, and data warehouse architects in particular have been loading up their iPods. Among their favorites are the following: 

• The Meet the Oracle Linux Kernel Team podcast series is a great source of information about technologies such as asynchronous I/O, the Reliable Datagram Sockets, hardware interconnect, the Oracle Cluster File System and Network File System, and the kernel development process overall—directly from the brains of kernel developers. 

• In the architecture space, OTN regularly publishes podcast interviews with the authors of "The New SOA Standards" technical white papers, a series first published in 2006 that brings concepts such as enterprise service buses, service-oriented architecture (SOA) services orchestration and governance, and Web services "fabric" to the implementation-oriented OTN audience. 

• For data warehouse architects, the Focus on Data Warehousing series offers an insider's view into data warehousing topics such as modeling, data quality, and partitioning for performance. 

Download individual podcasts at the respective technology centers. Or, subscribe to the entire OTN TechCast RSS feed.

Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer Challenge 

Dulcian's application impressed the judges with its imaginative use of Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) combined with intelligent use of Oracle Database to create a highly dynamic and flexible survey application. This particular kind of dynamically configured application is hard to build in a completely generic way. However, the Dulcian team has cracked that nut with a clever and elegant solution that leverages the declarative power of Oracle ADF to provide a practical and reusable survey engine. The technology has been put to a worthy cause in its first implementation for the Preeclampsia Foundation.

Close on the heels of Dulcian's grand-prize technology were two impressive first-prize winners: 

• Deepak Prabhu of SkillNet won for his Store Hub retail applications integration solution. 

• Shibu Pillai of BearingPoint won for his OraApps Integrator application.

Both first-prize winners took home a Slingbox streaming device from Sling Media, and all three winners were invited to Oracle headquarters to meet with Oracle senior executives.