Skip to main content

Thanks, ODC (Oracle Developer Community)!

I owe a lot of thanks to the ODC - which stands for Oracle Developer Community.  What is ODC?  You may remember it as OTN, or the Oracle Technology Network.  Same people, different name.  Why they changed it I can't say.  People just liked it better that way... (love that song)

In any case, what am I thankful for?  A lot.  To start, the tools that I use day in and day out: SQL Developer, ORDS, Oracle Data Modeler, SQLcl and - of course - APEX.  Without these tools, I'm likely on a completely different career path, perhaps even one that aligns more closely with my degree in television management.

While the tools are great, it's really the people that make up the community that make ODC stand out. From the folks who run ODC and the Oracle ACE program to the developers and product managers who are behind the awesome tools, the ODC community is one of, if not the greatest asset of being involved with Oracle's products.

If you have yet to get more involved with this community, and are wondering how you can, well, there's no better time that on ODC appreciation day!  Here's some basic and simple things that you can do to become more involved:

  • Read and reply to posts on the ODC forums.  You'd be surprised how far a simple reply can go to help others.
  • Attend local user group conferences.  Consider not only presenting at them as well, but volunteering your time to help with the organization.
  • Attend and/or create a local MeetUp that focuses on the tools that you use.  It can be as general or as specific as you'd like it to be.
  • Get a Twitter account and follow the ODC community members.  Not sure where to start?  Try this list of "Oracle Peeps" from Jeff Smith: https://twitter.com/thatjeffsmith/lists/oraclepeeps
  • Encourage your co-workers to do the same!
There's no better way of showing your support for the ODC community than becoming more involved with it!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Custom Export to CSV

It's been a while since I've updated my blog. I've been quite busy lately, and just have not had the time that I used to. We're expecting our 1st child in just a few short weeks now, so most of my free time has been spent learning Lamaze breathing, making the weekly run to Babies R Us, and relocating my office from the larger room upstairs to the smaller one downstairs - which I do happen to like MUCH more than I had anticipated. I have everything I need within a short walk - a bathroom, beer fridge, and 52" HD TV. I only need to go upstairs to eat and sleep now, but alas, this will all change soon... Recently, I was asked if you could change the way Export to CSV in ApEx works. The short answer is, of course, no. But it's not too difficult to "roll your own" CSV export procedure. Why would you want to do this? Well, the customer's requirement was to manipulate some data when the Export link was clicked, and then export it to CSV in a forma...
76 comments
Read more

Manipulating Images with the... Database?

A recent thread on the OTN HTML DB Forum asked about how to determine the width & height of an image stored as a BLOB in an Oracle table. I mentioned in that thread that I have some code to manipulate an image stored in a BLOB column. This is particularly useful if you’re going to let users upload images, and you want to re-size them to display as a thumbnail. Thanks to Oracle interMedia , it is trivial to manipulate the width, height, and other attributes of images stored in an Oracle table. I’ve created a sample application here which demonstrates Oracle interMedia and HTML DB in action. Feel free to have a look. You can download this application from HTML DB Studio as well. Basically, this application allows you to upload images and perform an operation on the image as it is inserted into the PHOTO_CATALOG table. There are two places where some PL/SQL code is required: an After Submit process on page 2, and a procedure to display the images. Here is the PL/SQL for the After...
33 comments
Read more

Page 0 Branches

What? There's no way to put a Branch on Page 0 of an ApEx application! Or is there... Technically, no - page 0 does not support branches. But how many times do you wish it did? This scenario recently came up: I wanted to put a "Search" box on every page in my application, so no matter where a user is, they can search the site. Currently, it has 10 or so pages, but this will grow to closer to 50 by production. So, thought #1 was to put an text item on Page 0, call it search, and then ensure that each and every page had some sort of Branch to run the search. Not so fun, as this was a tedious task, even for just 10 pages. And each time a new page was added to the application - by myself or anyone else - the search branch would have to be added to the page. Clearly not a scalable solution. With a little bit of help from Raj from the ApEx team, I came up with this solution: Create Page 0, if you haven't already On page 0, create an item of type "Text Field (...
13 comments
Read more