Category: Tech

Technology

Number one again in time for OOW 2014

A great thank you to my readers!  See below!

SQL Expert book at number one again on Amazon's Oracle booklist

I just grabbed the above image from the Amazon website earlier tonight, September 24, 2014, at 11:52 p.m.

It shows that my book – OCA Oracle Database SQL Certified Expert Exam Guide (Exam 1Z0-047) – is number one again at Amazon.com’s Oracle category, less than one week prior to the Oracle Open World / JavaOne 2014 conference in Silicon Valley.

A hearty thank you to all my readers on behalf of me and the writing and editorial team at McGraw-Hill and Oracle Press!  Thank you thank you!

Congratulations to jaramill “gjaram”!

A hearty congratulations to jaramill “gjaram” and a big thank you as well for the excellent review he posted of my SQL Expert book at Amazon.com.  He wrote:

“This is my review 3 months after I bought the book but just 2 days after taking the exam……and PASSING it on the first try!”

So welcome jaramill to the world of certified SQL experts! And thank you for the very nice review.

If you wish to see jaramill’s complete review click here, it’s titled “Worthwhile guide to help you for the exam” and gives my book five out of five stars.

“Mind blowing book”

I’m sending out a huge thank you to Gobikrishnan Srinivasan for this great comment about my book that he posted online:

“I did my certification on last saturday being a sql expert u r given a class A seat and my suggestion is go for steve o hearn books its simply mind blowing book i learnt a lot from it it helped me to pass the exam”1

You can see this comment for yourself on LinkedIn, in a discussion among the elite members of the Oracle Database SQL Certified Experts group.  Gobikrishnan is a member of that group and lists himself as a Compliance Analyst at IBM.

The book he’s talking about of course is OCA Oracle Database SQL Certified Expert Exam Guide (Exam 1Z0-047).

Thank you Gobikrishnan for the great endorsement!

SQL Expert is number one again

SQL Expert book at number one on Amazon's Orace booklist

Some friends have drawn my attention to the fact that my 2009 book OCA Oracle Database SQL Certified Expert Exam Guide (Exam 1Z0-047) has been back at number one in Amazon’s “Oracle” books list.

I’ve observed that Amazon’s best-seller lists appear to be updated as often as hourly.  So it might be at number one as I type this, but elsewhere – such as 4th or 7th – later in the day.  This latest book of mine has been bouncing around in the top 10 of all Oracle books for a few months now.  Every now and then it will show up as number one, perhaps about once every few days in my observation.  Now – if I had privileges to query Amazon’s database, I could produce an accurate and comprehensive report.  If you’re a reader of my book, you could create such a query too!

On the book’s main page, Amazon displays a “Best Seller!” flag when it hits number one, with a link to the list.

I’m sure the interest in the book is largely driven by the exam itself, of course, which is a fantastic professional credential for anyone to get.  When you can add a blurb to your resume with the keywords “Oracle” and “expert” together, you’re doing treat.  That being said, I’ve also received plenty of email from readers who are just honing their skills and filling in gaps in their knowledge, with or without plans to take the exam.  The book is uniquely useful for that as well.

So – a huge “thank you” to all my readers!  You’re the reason this is all happening, and I thank you.

New app reads your mind

A new application for the cutting edge Google Glass platform will read your mind.  The app can sense when your brain waves indicate you’re focusing on an image.  When you focus, the app will snap a picture of whatever you’re looking at through the eye glasses and upload the image to Twitter.

It’s called MindRDR and TechCrunch wrote about it here.  To read your brainwaves, it uses a third party device called the Neurosky EEG biosensor, which integrates with your eye glasses.

What do you think?  Would you use it?

Conference in Williamsburg, Sqoop, and Big Data Connectors

Yesterday  – April 24, 2014 – I had the privilege of presenting at the Virginia Oracle User Group (VOUG) annual Oracle Conference on the James, or OCOJ for short.  The “James” is the James River right there in Williamsburg, Virginia.  I promised my audience I would publish the Power Point slides, so here they are:

Yesterday could not have been a more glorious day. The Doubletree Hotel in Williamsburg is really a conference center, with a variety of beautiful meeting rooms and great skylights and large glass walls.  The room in which I presented was unusual in that it had one door that led directly outside.  The hotel propped it open and the beautiful air flowed it, it was remarkably refreshing.  I particularly enjoyed it, given the many snow days we’ve had this past winter and even into the spring.  The air was fresh and the temperatures just perfect, what a great day.

I was definitely in with some illustrious company – other presenters throughout the day included Mary Gable, David Mann, Craig Shallahammer, Greg Mays, Scott Poteet, Bill Myers, and Oracle’s own Bob Bunting as well as Robert Freeman.  The legendary Tom Kyte (of Ask Tom fame) was the keynote speaker.  Brilliant talent was on display everywhere.

For more information about VOUG, visit their website here:  http://www.voug.org.

Here’s a copy of the full conference agenda:  VOUG OCOJ Conference Agenda.

Thanks to one of my great audience members who took the photo.  And a huge thanks to Linda Hoover for making the entire event possible – thank you Linda!

Attention Madison Avenue Executives

Ignore Button

Dear Advertising Industry Executives,

If you want my attention, stop SCREAMING AT ME.

When television commercials used to play at the same volume as TV shows themselves, I paid attention to those commercials.  But once you began CRANKING UP THE VOLUME of commercials so that they BLASTED OUT OF MY TV, I began turning my TV on mute and walking away.

Now you’re doing the same thing on the Internet.  I’m watching simulcast shows online and finding that the commercials are suddenly BLASTING AT MAXIMUM VOLUME.

Maybe the SHOUTING works in the television broadcast medium.  But online it is really easy for me to hit MUTE and find something else to do.  And that’s exactly what I’m doing.

LOUD COMMERCIALS never worked with me on television, why are you taking that miserable policy to the Internet?

Apostolis Giannakidis, Apache Gora, and Oracle’s NoSQL

I’m so impressed …

Readers of this blog may remember the brilliant and gracious Apostolis Giannakidis, who I wrote about on August 21, 2012.  Apostolis tweeted some kind words about my book when he announced to the world that he nailed the Oracle SQL Expert exam with a 93 percent passing score – far in excess of what is required to establish certification!  I blogged about his tweet here, and he found my post and commented about it here.

So today I looked at his own blog, which is linked from his comment.  And WOW – Apostolis is joining the Google Summer of Code 2013 to help integrate Apache Gora with Oracle NoSQL.  This is huge stuff, folks, Apache is where all the cool cutting edge open source envelope-pushing is happening, and Gora is the project for big data persistence and in-memory data model support.  Gora is related to other cool Apache projects, like Cassandra.  Extremely cool work, and Apostolis is right in the middle of it all.

Congratulations Apostolis!