How often do you run off to your favourite sites and devour information put together by others? It’s quite remarkable how hard stuff is until you’ve done it one or more times. The seemingly insurmountable task becomes second nature once mastered. Hey, Alex Gorbachev or Jonathan Lewis were once beginners just like you and me. In the days when I got started there was no internet, no Twitter, no Metalink (MOS), and little, if no email. We used the good old-fashioned phone … a traditional landline at that. They used to have round apparatus with holes in them called “dials.”
Something you have done may be a mystery to others and the seemingly most menial tasks (to you) may be like a vertical wall to others. Think back to 10 things you have done in the past few weeks. Estimate the number of those 10 things that would be “news” to others… Got that right… All 10. We owe it to others to blog about what we do on a daily basis and go out of our ways to find time to educate the masses.
To shed some light on an example that went down in the early to mid ’90s, picture the following (purveyors of SQL*Forms 2 and 3 may remember this). Triggers were used in a way similar to they are today. Events occurred as we moved around a screen (character-based at that :)). A common trigger was called POST-CHANGE and I became frustrated as we went to Forms 3 remembering that this trigger would not fire until the cursor left a field. I needed a way to execute a trigger while the cursor still resided in a field. Along comes a developer with 3 months experience. She suggests coding an ON-VALIDATE-FIELD trigger. Swell I said to myself knowing well that this trigger as well would not fire until the cursor left the field. So as not to offend here, I did just that. She also suggested placing the text “ENTER;” in the trigger code and all would proceed exactly as hoped.
I tried it out after chuckling to myself, based on what I already knew about Forms and it WORKED. There is the rub… No matter how little you may know, your expertise may lie in a corner of technology, others have not experienced yet. Your experiences are valuable to others and it is your obligation to blog. Nothing to blog about — think again.
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Michael,
Your point is quite profound. I love being on a team of DBAs instead of being the sole DBA in a smaller company. I learn a lot from each of my teammates and from the developers we support. Even people who seem to be less experienced than me have all kinds of knowledge and experience that I don’t have and I often learn new things I don’t expect if I respect them enough to listen.
– Bobby