As Published In March/April 2010

AT ORACLE: OTN Bulletin

Best Reads of 2009

Articles on Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle RMAN, and Oracle ADF top the list.

On the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) team, we always find it instructive to review what the community is reading. For that reason, one of our most important end-of-year traditions is to formulate and analyze a “most popular” list of technical articles published over the course of the previous year.

Note that the list below accounts for new articles only, rather than looking at recent views of popular articles published prior to 2009. For live links to these articles, see my blog post on this subject at www.bit.ly/UeivA. As noted, a few of the articles are from Oracle Magazine.

“Installing Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control Release 5 on Oracle Database 11g and Linux,” by Mike Revitt
The popularity of this article says a lot about how this release was received. Clearly, a sizable number of Oracle Database 11g administrators were not willing to wait for Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Grid Control.

“High-Performance Oracle JDBC Programming,” by Yuli Vasiliev
Is managing JDBC database connections for maximum performance an art or a science? Probably a little bit of both, but regardless of your answer, Yuli Vasiliev provides some excellent tips for exploiting connection and statement pooling.

“Oracle RMAN Backups: Pushing the ‘Easy’ Button,” by Porus Homi Havewala
Although he’s relatively new to the OTN editorial scene, Oracle ACE Director Porus Homi Havewala became a popular author in 2009. His articles about the optimal use of Oracle Enterprise Manager for enterprise management have proven to be crowd-pleasers.

“Scripting Oracle RMAN Commands,” by Arup Nanda (Oracle Magazine, September/October 2009)
Like Porus Homi Havewala, Oracle ACE Director Arup Nanda is a proven draw—or is it Oracle RMAN that’s the draw? Either way, readers flocked to this overview of scripting Oracle RMAN commands in Oracle Database 11g.

“On Dynamic Sampling,” by Tom Kyte (Oracle Magazine, January/February 2009)
Tom Kyte strikes again. Enough said.

“Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control Architecture for Very Large Sites,” by Porus Homi Havewala
Was 2009 the Year of Oracle Enterprise Manager? If not, you’d never know it from this list.

“Taking an Oracle ADF Application from Design to Reality,” by Chris Muir and Penny Cookson
Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) has reached critical mass in terms of Oracle customer awareness, but there is still work to be done in the area of best practices. In this multipart article, Oracle ACE Director Chris Muir and Oracle ACE Penny Cookson take readers through the design and construction of an Oracle ADF application, step by step. 

“High Performance and Availability with Oracle RAC and PHP,” by John Lim
An interesting surprise. Here John Lim, who happens to be the developer of the ADOdb database abstraction library for PHP, describes a client company’s deployment of Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) and Oracle Database 10g, Standard Edition, behind a PHP Web application. Nice.

Oracle ADF Development Essentials, by John Stegeman
I’ve mentioned before that development best practices for Oracle ADF are in short supply, but as you might expect, the Oracle ACE community is rushing in to fill that gap. In this series of articles, Oracle ACE Director John Stegeman describes the use of common Java developer tools such as Subversion, JUnit, and Hudson alongside Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF. It’s a must-read for any Oracle ADF developer.

Even if none of these articles appeals to you, it’s always instructive to know what your peers are interested in. And if you’re an aspiring author, this list isn’t a bad source of ideas.

As always, we welcome your editorial proposals. You can see our author guidelines and submission procedures at oracle.com/technology/contact/otn_submit.html.