COMMIT

By Franck Pachot

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COMMIT is the SQL statement that ends a transaction, with two goals: persistence (changes are durable) and sharing (changes are visible to others). That’s a weird title and introduction for the 499th blog post I write on the dbi-services blog. 499 posts in nearly 5 years- roughly two blog posts per week. This activity was mainly motivated by the will to persist and share what I learn every day.

Persistence is primarily for myself: writing a test case with a little explanation is a good way to remember an issue encountered, and Google helps to get back to it when the problem is encountered again later. Sharing is partly for others: I learn a lot from what others are sharing (blogs, forums, articles, mailing lists,…) and it makes sense to also share what I learn. But in addition to that, publishing an idea is also a good way to validate it. If something is partially wrong or badly explained, or just benefits from exchanging ideas, then I’ll get feedbacks, by comments, tweets, e-mails.

This high throughput of things I learn every day gets its source from multiple events. In a consulting company, going from one customer to another means different platforms, versions, editions, different requirements, different approaches. Our added value is our experience. From all the problems seen in all those environments, we have build knowledge, best practices and tools (this is the idea of DMK) to bring a reliable and efficient solution to customers projects. But dbi services also invests a lot in research and training, in order to build this knowledge pro-actively, before encountering the problems at customers. A lot of blog posts were motivated by lab problems only (beta testing, learning new features, setting up a proof of concept before proposing it to a customer). And then encountered later at customers, with faster solutions as this had been investigated before. Dbi services also provides workshops for all technologies and preparing training exercises, as well as giving the workshop, was also a great source of blog posts.

I must say that dbi services is an amazing company in this area. Five years ago, I blogged in French on developpez.com and answered forums such as dba-village.com, and wrote a few articles for SOUG. But as soon as I started at dbi services, I passed the OCM, I presented for the first time in public, at DOAG, and then at many local and international conferences. I attended my first Oracle Open World. I became ACE and later ACE Director. The blogging activity is one aspect only. What the dbi services Technology Organization produces is amazing, for the benefit of the customers and the consultants.

You may have heard that I’m going to work in the database team at CERN, which means quiescing my consulting and blogging activity here. For sure I’ll continue to share, but probably differently. Maybe on the Databases at CERN blog, and probably posting on Medium. Blogs will be also replicated to http://www.oaktable.net/ of course. Anyway, it is easy to find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. For sure I’ll be at conferences and probably not only Oracle ones.

I encourage you to continue to follow the dbi services blog, as I’ll do. Many colleagues are already sharing on all technologies. And new ones are coming. Even if my goal was the opposite, I’m aware that publishing so often may have throttled other authors to do so. I’m now releasing some bandwidth to them. The dbi services blog is in the 9th position in the Top-100 Oracle blogs and 27th position in the Top-60 Database blogs with 6 blog posts a week on average. And there’s also a lot non-database topics covered as well. So stay tuned on https://www.dbi-services.com/blog/.