Humor, SQL Developer, Inertia

Humor (Laugh and Cry Department)

The author of the Bex Huff blog had a friend who worked for Oracle and left, in the process filling out an online exit interview form. I know a lot of people in Oracle, and I've noticed our retention rate is quite good. I'd always thought it was our excellent benefits (my optometrist always seems to go: 'Wow! This is a great plan!', and pulls out the list of exotic lense coatings and the platinum eyeglass frames list, for instance). It turns out people just don't want to tangle with the exit interview form. You can see it here.

SQL Developer

Eddie Awad has a good tip on how to prevent the sometimes annoying pauses in working with SQL Developer when it is trying to helpfully fill in code for you. Like many helpful things that computers do for us, this often produces frustration, rage, cursing and the flinging around of small office supplies. So Eddie tells us how to turn it off.

Inertia, or 'We've Always Done It Like that'

I remember reading an anecdote about a woman who was making dinner for her mother who was visiting from out of town. She took out a steak, cut off about a third of it, and fried up the rest. Her mom asked her, 'Honey, why did you cut off that piece of steak?'. The daughter explained that it was because that's the way mom herself always did it at home. The mother shook her head and said, 'Darlin', I did it because I had a small frying pan. Why are you doing it?'

Processes get set up, break down, get repaired, and at some point seem to get set in stone. The people who establish them move on to other jobs and the processes live on, sacrosanct remnants of ancestral IT standards. Well that can hurt your bottom line, so you should think twice about using old procedures when setting up something new.

Chen Shapira's 'I'm Just a Simple DBA...' blog has a good example (with some nice grotty storage and networking techie details to boot).