First Day at the New Job

It’s Wednesday night, and I’m already ½ way through the first week of the new job. If I had $1 for each time I said “we” – meaning Oracle – I would be able to take the rest of the week off! I guess it will take some time before I can refer to Oracle as “them”.

Being on the outside is very different. No longer can I pop into MetaLink to look up a TAR or Bug. I can’t access any of the internal sites which I used to do on a daily, if not more frequent basis. Call it separation anxiety, but I guess daily habits take some time to break. It was especially weird not being at OpenWorld this week. From what I heard, it was going well with a ton of interest in HTML DB, as well as BPEL & Fusion.

Speaking of OpenWorld, I have also been reading about Oracle Raptor on Brian Duff & Wilfred’s blog. I’ve known about this project for some time, but obviously couldn’t comment until it was made public. I think that it’s about time that Oracle entered into this market. I remember back when I first started at Oracle, I was surprised that I had to rely on TOAD for basic schema maintenance & development.

Anyways, back to the new job. So far, so good. Aside from getting lost in the parking garage, which is more akin to medieval catacombs than a logically built parking structure, things have been going well. The new team has been quite busy, so aside from a couple of hours of orientation on Monday, I’ve been left alone to explore the application which I will be working on.

Once I proved that I knew how not to blow up a server, I was given all of the passwords to the development instance so that I could install HTML DB. I must say that it went quite fast on the 6-way HP machine. The only issue that I encountered was that some process had placed a lock on DBMS_LOCK, and the install couldn’t proceed. Thanks to Joel from the HTML DB team, I was able to resolve this as per a MetaLink Note.

After creating a new entry in the wdbsrv.app file, I ran into the same issue that someone on the Forums was having. Luckily, something sparked a distant memory of encountering this issue on another instance of the eBusiness Suite where I installed HTML DB, and I was able to recall how I solved it quickly.

Once HTML DB was installed, I integrated it with their Single Sign On server, so that we could use the same usernames from the eBusiness Suite. I then added a Responsibility and created an HTML DB Authorization Scheme based on it: If your user has this Responsibility, then you can access my HTML DB application.

Tomorrow, I’m going to create my first PL/SQL package to generate some sort of exception report. I’ve already been given the green light to do this in HTML DB, so I’m looking forward to that.

On another note, I watched jetBlue flight 292 land safely with a disabled nose gear at LAX live tonight. The pilots & crew of that flight should be commended, as it sounds like they treated this incident as nothing more than an “inconvenience”, all the while keeping the passengers informed and reassured every step along the way. As usual, the media made utter fools of themselves, asking the droves of aviation experts the most ridiculous questions via phone. My two favorites: 1) What role is the fire department playing? 2) Is it easier to land in clear weather than in, say a thunderstorm? Priceless.