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• Four New Java Champions

  - by Tori Wieldt

  Four luminaries in the Java community have been selected as new Java Champions. The are Agnes Crepet, Lars Vogel, Yara Senger and Martijn Verburg. They were selected for their technical knowledge, leadership, inspiration, and tireless work for the community. Here is how they rock the Java world: Agnes Crepet Agnes Crepet (France) is a passionate technologist with over 11 years of software engineering experience, especially in the Java technologies, as a Developer, Architect, Consultant and Trainer. She has been using Java since 1999, implementing multiple kinds of applications (from 20 days to 10000 men days) for different business fields (banking, retail, and pharmacy). Currently she is a Java EE Architect for a French pharmaceutical company, the homeopathy world leader. She is also the co-founder, with other passionate Java developers, of a software company named Ninja Squad, dedicated to Software Craftsmanship. Agnes is the leader of two Java User Groups (JUG), the Lyon JUG Duchess France and the founder of the Mix-IT Conferenceand theCast-IT Podcast, two projects about Java and Agile Development. She speaks at Java and JUG conferences around the world and regularly writes articles about the Java Ecosystem for the French print Developer magazine Programmez! and for the Duchess Blog. Follow Agnes @agnes_crepet. Lars Vogel Lars Vogel (Germany) is the founder and CEO of the vogella GmbH and works as Java, Eclipse and Android consultant, trainer and book author. He is a regular speaker at international conferences, such as EclipseCon, Devoxx, Droidcon and O'Reilly's Android Open. With more than one million visitors per month, his website vogella.com is one of the central sources for Java, Eclipse and Android programming information. Lars is committer in the Eclipse project and received in 2010 the "Eclipse Top Contributor Award" and 2012 the "Eclipse Top Newcomer Evangelist Award." Follow Lars on Twitter @vogella. Yara Senger Yara Senger (Brazil) has been a tireless Java activist in Brazil for many years. She is President of SouJava and she is an alternate representative of the group on the JCP Executive Committee. Yara has led SouJava in many initiatives, from technical events to social activities. She is co-founder and director of GlobalCode, which trains developers throughout Brazil.  Last year, she was recipient of the Duke Choice's Award, for the JHome embedded environment.  Yara is also an active speaker, giving presentations in many countries, including JavaOne SF, JavaOne Latin Ameria, JavaOne India, JFokus, and JUGs throughout Brazil. Yara is editor of InfoQ Brasil and also frequently posts at http://blog.globalcode.com.br/search/label/Yara. Follow Yara @YaraSenger. Martijn Verburg Martijn Verburg (UK) is the CTO of jClarity (a Java/JVM performance cloud tooling start-up) and has over 12 years experience as a Java/JVM technology professional and OSS mentor in a variety of organisations from start-ups to large enterprises. He is the co-leader of the London Java Community (~2800 developers) and leads the global effort for the Java User Group "Adopt a JSR" and "Adopt OpenJDK" programmes. These programmes encourage day to day Java developer involvement with OpenJDK, Java standards (JSRs), an important relationship for keeping the Java ecosystem relevant to the 9 million Java developers out there today. As a leading expert on technical team optimisation, his talks and presentations are in high demand by major conferences (JavaOne, Devoxx, OSCON, QCon) where you'll often find him challenging the industry status quo via his alter ego "The Diabolical Developer." You can read more in the OTN ariticle "Challenging the Diabolical Developer: A Conversation with JavaOne Rock Star Martijn Verburg." Follow Martijn @karianna. The Java Champions are an exclusive group of passionate Java technology and community leaders who are community-nominated and selected under a project sponsored by Oracle. Java Champions get the opportunity to provide feedback, ideas, and direction that will help Oracle grow the Java Platform. Congratulations to these new Java Champions!

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• How to prepare for an interview presentation!

  - by Tim Koekkoek

  During an interview process you might be asked to prepare a presentation as one of the steps in the recruitment process. Below, we want to give you some tips to help you prepare for what might be considered a daunting aspect of a recruitment process. Main purpose of the presentation Always keep in mind the main purpose of what the presentation is meant to convey. Generally speaking, an interview presentation is for the company to check if you have the ability to represent and sell the organization (and yourself), to the internal and external stakeholders in the position you are applying for. A presentation is often also part of the recruitment process to check whether you can structure and explain your experience and thoughts in a convincing manner. If you are unsure about the purpose of the presentation, feel free to ask your recruiter for more information. Preparation As with every task you do, preparation is key, so is the case with an interview presentation. It is important to know who your audience is. You have to adapt your presentation to your audience, ensuring that you are presenting the facts which they would want to hear. Furthermore, make sure you practice your presentation beforehand; this will make you more confident in your presenting skills. Also, estimate the length of your presentation as presentations or pitches during the recruitment process are often capped to a certain time limit. Structure Every presentation should have a beginning, middle and an end. Make sure you give an overview of your presentation and tell the audience what they can expect. Your presentation should have a logical order and a clear message. Always build up to your key message with strong arguments and evidence. When speaking about the topic, make sure you convey your points with conviction. Also be sure you believe the message you bring forward, if you don’t believe it yourself, then the audience definitely won’t! Delivery When you think back on successful presentations you have seen, the presenter was most likely always standing up. So if asked to do a presentation, follow this example and make sure you stand up as well. Standing up when you are doing your presentation shows confidence and control. Another important aspect in the delivery of the presentation is to relax and speak slowly and with enough volume for the audience to hear you. Speaking slowly allows the audience the time to absorb the information you are providing to them. Visual Using PowerPoint, or an equivalent, makes it very easy to have a visually attractive presentation. Make sure however that you take into account that the visual aids you use are there to support you, not for you to read word for word what is on the slides! Questions When starting your presentation, it is a good idea to tell your audience that you will deal with any questions they might have at the end of the presentation. This way it doesn’t interrupt your train of thought and the flow of your presentation. Answering questions at the end may give you additional opportunities to further expand on your facts in the topic. Some people might play the “devil’s advocate” role and confront you with opposing opinions, if this is the case, take your time to reiterate your points and remain professional in your response. A good way to deal with this is to start interacting with other members of the audience and ask for their opinions, so it will become a group discussion. This will also shows strong leadership skills, as you are open to discuss and ask for other opinions. If you are interested in more tips and tricks for your interview process, have a look at Competency Based Interview Tips and How to prepare for a Telephone Interview. For more information about Oracle and our vacancies, please visit our Facebook community and our careers website.

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• Offre d’emploi – Job Offer - Montreal

  - by guybarrette

  I’m currently helping a client plan its management systems re-architecture and they are looking to hire a full time .NET developer.  It’s a small 70 people company located in the Old Montreal, you’ll be the sole dev there and you’ll use the latest technologies in re writing their core systems. Here’s the job offer in French: Concepteur de logiciel et programmeur-analyste .NET chevronné (poste permanent à temps plein) Employeur : Traductions Serge Bélair inc. Ville : Montreal QC TRSB, cabinet de traduction en croissance rapide regroupant à l’interne une des équipes de professionnels les plus compétentes et les plus diversifiées du secteur de la traduction au Canada, désire combler le poste de : Le concepteur de logiciel et programmeur-analyste .Net sera responsable de la conception, du développement complet et de l’implantation d’une solution clés en main personnalisée pour répondre aux besoins de l’entreprise. Il réalisera la conception, la programmation, la documentation, les tests, le dépannage et la maintenance du nouveau système de gestion des opérations de l’entreprise utilisant des bases de données et offrant une grande souplesse pour la production de rapports. S’il est nécessaire de faire appel à des fournisseurs ou à des consultants pour la réalisation du projet, il sera responsable de trouver les ressources requises, devra assurer les communications avec ces ressources et voir à l’exécution du travail. Il sera également appelé à mettre à jour et à maintenir les applications actuellement utilisées dans l’entreprise jusqu’à ce que l’application développée puisse être utilisée. Les principales tâches du concepteur et programmeur-analyste chevronné recherché seront les suivantes : Concevoir et développer un nouveau système de gestion des opérations en fonction des besoins d’exploitation de l’entreprise Trouver les ressources externes et internes requises Assurer les communications et le suivi avec des fournisseurs externes (p. ex., programmeurs, analystes ou architectes) Assumer la responsabilité de la mise en place du nouveau système de gestion des opérations Résoudre les problèmes liés au nouveau système de gestion des opérations Assurer le soutien les soirs de semaine et la fin de semaine (au besoin), principalement avec des outils de travail à distance Maintenir la documentation du système de gestion des opérations à jour Exécuter d’autres tâches connexes Exigences Baccalauréat en informatique ou l’équivalent Au moins 5 années d’expérience pertinente 2 ans et plus d'expérience en programmation C# Excellente connaissance en programmation d’applications Web avec bases de données Excellente connaissance en méthodologie structurée de développement et des techniques de programmation itératives Habiletés à procéder à la récolte d’informations ainsi que la rédaction de documents d’analyse Spécialisations techniques Essentielle - Design et programmation orientée objet avec C#, ASP.NET, .NET Framework 3.5, AJAX Importante - Silverlight 3, WCF, LINQ, SQL Server, Team Foundation Server Atout - Entity Framework, MVC, jQuery, MySQL, QuickBooks, Suite d’outils Telerik Technologies utilisées C# 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, Team Foundation Server 2010, LINQ, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, WCF, Silverlight 4, SQL Server 2008, MySQL, QuickBooks, Suite d’outils Telerik Qualités recherchées Bilinguisme oral et écrit Sens élevé des responsabilités Autonomie Sens de l’initiative Volonté de dépassement Leadership et aptitudes à la prise de décisions Motivation élevée Minutie et souci du détail Bon sens de l’organisation Souplesse et bonne capacité d’adaptation au changement Une expérience antérieure du développement de logiciel avec flux de processus et modules de facturation, de l’établissement de ponts entre des bases de données de types différents (Quickbooks et SQL p. ex.) et des outils d’aide à la traduction serait un atout important. Excellentes conditions de travail : salaire et avantages sociaux très concurrentiels, milieu de travail stimulant dans un environnement agréable, dans le Vieux-Montréal. Faire parvenir votre CV et votre lettre de motivation à [email protected] TRSB 276, rue Saint-Jacques, bureau 900 Montréal (Québec) H2Y 1N3 L’usage du générique masculin a pour seul but d’alléger le texte et d’en faciliter la lecture. var addthis_pub="guybarrette";

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• Tuesday at OpenWorld: Identity Management

  - by Tanu Sood

  At Oracle OpenWorld? From keynotes, general sessions to product deep dives and executive events, this Tuesday is full of informational, educational and networking opportunities for you. Here’s a quick run-down of what’s happening today: Tuesday, October 2, 2012 KEYNOTE: The Oracle Cloud: Oracle’s Cloud Platform and Applications Strategy 8:00 a.m. – 9:45 a.m., Moscone North, Hall D Leading customers will join Oracle Executive Vice President Thomas Kurian to discuss how Oracle’s innovative cloud solutions are transforming how they manage their business, excite and retain their employees, and deliver great customer experiences through Oracle Cloud. GENERAL SESSION: Oracle Fusion Middleware Strategies Driving Business Innovation 10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., Moscone North - Hall D Join Hasan Rizvi, Executive Vice President of Product in this strategy and roadmap session to hear how developers leverage new innovations in their applications and customers achieve their business innovation goals with Oracle Fusion Middleware. CON9437: Mobile Access Management 10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., Moscone West 3022 The session will feature Identity Management evangelists from companies like Intuit, NetApp and Toyota to discuss how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON9162: Oracle Fusion Middleware: Meet This Year's Most Impressive Customer Projects 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 a.m., Moscone West, 3001 Hear from the winners of the 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards and see which customers are taking home a trophy for the 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award.  Read more about the Innovation Awards here. CON9491: Enhancing the End-User Experience with Oracle Identity Governance applications 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Join experts from Visa and Oracle as they explore how Oracle Identity Governance solutions deliver complete identity administration and governance solutions with support for emerging requirements like cloud identities and mobile devices. CON9447: Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Dealing with scale problems? Looking to address identity management requirements with million or so users in mind? Then take note of Cisco’s implementation. Join this session to hear first-hand how Cisco tackled identity management and scaled their implementation to bolster security and enforce compliance. CON9465: Next Generation Directory – Oracle Unified Directory 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Get the 360 degrees perspective from a solution provider, implementation services partner and the customer in this session to learn how the latest Oracle Unified Directory solutions can help you build a directory infrastructure that is optimized to support cloud, mobile and social networking and yet deliver on scale and performance. EVENTS: Executive Edge @ OpenWorld: Chief Security Officer (CSO) Summit 10:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. If you are attending the Executive Edge at Open World, be sure to check out the sessions at the Chief Security Officer Summit. Former Sr. Counsel for the National Security Agency, Joel Brenner, will be speaking about his new book "America the Vulnerable". In addition, PWC will present a panel discussion on "Crisis Management to Business Advantage: Security Leadership". See below for the complete agenda. PRODUCT DEMOS: And don’t forget to see Oracle identity Management solutions in action at Oracle OpenWorld DEMOgrounds. DEMOS LOCATION EXHIBITION HALL HOURS Access Management: Complete and Scalable Access Management Moscone South, Right - S-218 Monday, October 1 9:30 a.m.–6:00 p.m. 9:30 a.m.–10:45 a.m. (Dedicated Hours) Tuesday, October 2 9:45 a.m.–6:00 p.m. 2:15 p.m.–2:45 p.m. (Dedicated Hours) Wednesday, October 3 9:45 a.m.–4:00 p.m. 2:15 p.m.–3:30 p.m. (Dedicated Hours) Access Management: Federating and Leveraging Social Identities Moscone South, Right - S-220 Access Management: Mobile Access Management Moscone South, Right - S-219 Access Management: Real-Time Authorizations Moscone South, Right - S-217 Access Management: Secure SOA and Web Services Security Moscone South, Right - S-223 Identity Governance: Modern Administration and Tooling Moscone South, Right - S-210 Identity Management Monitoring with Oracle Enterprise Manager Moscone South, Right - S-212 Oracle Directory Services Plus: Performant, Cloud-Ready Moscone South, Right - S-222 Oracle Identity Management: Closed-Loop Access Certification Moscone South, Right - S-221 For a complete listing, keep the Focus on Identity Management document handy. And don’t forget to converse with us while at OpenWorld @oracleidm. We look forward to hearing from you.

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• FairWarning Privacy Monitoring Solutions Rely on MySQL to Secure Patient Data

  - by Rebecca Hansen

  FairWarning® solutions have audited well over 120 billion events, each of which was processed and stored in a MySQL database. FairWarning is the world's leading supplier of privacy monitoring solutions for electronic health records, relied on by over 1,200 Hospitals and 5,000 Clinics to keep their patients' data safe. In January 2014, FairWarning was awarded the highest commendation in healthcare IT as the first ever Category Leader for Patient Privacy Monitoring in the "2013 Best in KLAS: Software & Services" report[1]. FairWarning has used MySQL as their solutions’ database from their start in 2005 to worldwide expansion and market leadership. FairWarning recently migrated their solutions from MyISAM to InnoDB and updated from MySQL 5.5 to 5.6. Following are some of benefits they’ve had as a result of those changes and reasons for their continued reliance on MySQL (from FairWarning MySQL Case Study). Scalability to Handle Terabytes of Data FairWarning's customers have a lot of data: On average, FairWarning customers receive over 700,000 events to be processed daily. Over 25% of their customers receive over 30 million events per day, which equates to over 1 billion events and nearly one terabyte (TB) of new data each month. Databases range in size from a few hundred GBs to 10+ TBs for enterprise deployments (data are rolled off after 13 months). Low or Zero Admin = Few DBAs "MySQL has not required a lot of administration. After it's been tuned, configured, and optimized for size on initial setup, we have very low administrative costs. I can scale and add more customers without adding DBAs. This has had a big, positive impact on our business.” - Chris Arnold, FairWarning Vice President of Product Management and Engineering. Performance Schema  As the size of FairWarning's customers has increased, so have their tables and data volumes. MySQL 5.6’ new maintenance and management features have helped FairWarning keep up. In particular, MySQL 5.6 performance schema’s low-level metrics have provided critical insight into how the system is performing and why. Support for Mutli-CPU Threads MySQL 5.6' support for multiple concurrent CPU threads, and FairWarning's custom data loader allow multiple files to load into a single table simultaneously vs. one at a time. As a result, their data load time has been reduced by 500%. MySQL Enterprise Hot Backup Because hospitals and clinics never stop, FairWarning solutions can’t either. FairWarning changed from using mysqldump to MySQL Enterprise Hot Backup, which has reduced downtime, restore time, and storage requirements. For many of their larger customers, restore time has decreased by 80%. MySQL Enterprise Edition and Product Roadmap Provide Complete Solution "MySQL's product roadmap fully addresses our needs. We like the fact that MySQL Enterprise Edition has everything included; there's no need to purchase separate modules."  - Chris Arnold Learn More>> FairWarning MySQL Case Study Why MySQL 5.6 is an Even Better Embedded Database for Your Products presentation Updating Your Products to MySQL 5.6, Best Practices for OEMs on-demand webinar (audio and / or slides + Q&A transcript) MyISAM to InnoDB – Why and How on-demand webinar (same stuff) Top 10 Reasons to Use MySQL as an Embedded Database white paper [1] 2013 Best in KLAS: Software & Services report, January, 2014. © 2014 KLAS Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved.

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• Smooth Sailing or Rough Waters: Navigating Policy Administration Modernization

  - by helen.pitts(at)oracle.com

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• Oracle Fusion CRM Implementation Bootcamp for EMEA Systems Integrators - Paris July 24-26th

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  To support partner success and increase win potential with Fusion CRM, we are organizing a unique bootcamp on Fusion CRM intended for Oracle EMEA partners on July 24th to 26th. Join us for this outstanding Bootcamp and learn from Oracle Corporation in-depth know-how on Fusion CRM. The official announcement will be forthcoming, yet we wanted you to determine the appropriate candidate to attend this workshop. Further to this we will send the actual invitation to the selected candidate. Due to the limited number of seats, we will be limiting the number of registrations per SI company and will be selecting the participants. If you are interested to have one or more representatives of your company to attend this bootcamp, please send an email to [email protected] by June 18th indicating the name and email address of the participants you would like to nominate, ranked by priority. What will we cover: This Bootcamp presents the fundamental concepts of the Oracle Fusion CRM applications. It introduces you to each functional area of the product, how it is used, and what you need to consider when implementing it for an organization. While we do examine implementation considerations, we do not address the detailed steps of implementation. Instead, we direct you to the relevant resources to learn more. Topics covered: Fusion CRM Introduction Fusion CRM Security Introduction Fusion Functional Setup Manager Introduction Customer Model Introduction Customer Center Introduction Customer Data Management Introduction Marketing & Campaigns Introduction Lead Management Introduction Territory Management Introduction Territory Modeling Introduction with Exercise Opportunity Management Introduction Forecasting Introduction Analytics Introduction CRM For Microsoft Outlook Introduction Customizing with Composers Introduction Roundtable Discussions, and time for hands-on labs (day 2, 3, 4) Next Steps, available resources, ongoing learning path, partner environments, keeping in touch and feedback Bootcamp Goals: Enable a new Fusion CRM implementation team member to: Describe the scope of Oracle Fusion CRM applications Describe the basic security model Describe the customer model Perform common sales and marketing user transactions Access and navigate the Functional Setup Manager Model territories in Fusion CRM using sample business requirements Do necessary planning before implementing the offerings and options Describe the analytics available with the Fusion CRM product Describe the basic page customizations that can be done to meet business requirements Find documentation and other courses to assist in performing setup tasks Expectations: This Bootcamp program should prime the SI organization implementation consultants to attain the basic skills necessary to support a consulting practice in the delivery, scoping, pricing, and planning of your Fusion CRM Implementations. Oracle University will begin to offer additional deep skill training, starting this summer, designed to follow the Introduction Bootcamp. Participants will be expected to participate in labs, exercises, workshops and roundtable discussions with the Oracle Product Managers. Who should attend: This class is designed for your lead CRM Implementation consultants, those who will support your Fusion CRM consulting practice as it grows. These individuals may be members of a centre of excellence, or skills leadership office. The individual who is attending the bootcamp must have prior experience implementing a CRM solution. Intended Audience: Oracle Diamond, Platinum and Gold Level SIs (Top SIs) with specialization in Oracle Applications CRM implementations, with a commitment to achieving Fusion CRM Implementation Specialization. Commitment expressed through an investment in a Center of Excellence/Innovation Center for Fusion CRM Applications. Individuals who will support the implementation practice as it is forming and will deliver Fusion CRM On Premise and Cloud Services implementations. Functional practice leaders, the future Fusion Application Wizards within the SI's organization. This Bootcamp is designed for people who: Will deliver Fusion CRM implementations Have had little or no exposure to Fusion CRM applications Are familiar with at least one other CRM application Have a business analyst level of technical background Prerequisites: Please note, that participants will be asked to take self-service-trainings (video format) and pass the related assessments prior to joining the Bootcamp. Fees: This event is FREE of charge for Oracle partners. When: 24 July – 26 July, 2012 (8:30 - 18:00 each day, including the last day; with recommended but optional evening events on all three days from 18:00 - 20:00 hrs) Where: Paris, France (Location to be defined) Travel: To make your travel hassel free, we kindly suggest you to plan your arrival to Paris on July 23rd and your departure on the 27th. Agenda: The final agenda and registration details will be issued closer to the event date.  

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• TechEd Israel 2010 may only accept speakers from sponsors

  - by RoyOsherove

  A month or so ago, Microsoft Israel started sending out emails to its partners and registered event users to “Save the date!” – Micraoft Teched Israel is coming, and it’s going to be this november! “Great news” I thought to myself. I’d been to a couple of the MS teched events, as a speaker and as an attendee, and it was lovely and professionally done. Israel is an amazing place for technology and development and TechEd hosted some big names in the world of MS software. A couple of weeks ago, I was shocked to hear from a couple of people that Microsoft Israel plans to only accept non-MS teched speakers, only from sponsors of the event. That means that according to the amount that you have paid, you get to insert one or more of your own selected speakers as part of teched. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks trying to gather more evidence of this, and have gotten some input from within MS about this information. It looks like that is indeed the case, though no MS rep. was prepared to answer any email I had publicly. If they approach me now I’d be happy to print their response. What does this mean? If this is true, it means that Microsoft Israel is making a grave mistake – They are diluting the quality of the speakers for pure money factors. That means, that as a teched attendee, who paid good money, you might be sitting down to watch nothing more that a bunch of infomercials, or sub-standard speakers – since speakers are no longer selected on quality or interest in their topic. They are turning the conference from a learning event to a commercial driven event They are closing off the stage to the community of speakers who may not be associated with any organization  willing to be a sponsor They are losing speakers (such as myself) who will not want to be part of such an event. (yes – even if my company ends up sponsoring the event, I will not take part in it, Sorry Eli!) They are saying “F&$K you” to the community of MVPs who should be the people to be approached first about technical talks (my guess is many MVPs wouldn’t want to talk at an event driven that way anyway ) I do hope this ends up not being true, but it looks like it is. MS Israel had already done such a thing with the Developer Days event previouly held in Israel – only sponsors were allowed to insert speakers into the event. If this turns out to be true I would urge the MS community in Israel to NOT TAKE PART AT THIS EVENT in any form (attendee, speaker, sponsor or otherwise). by taking part, you will be telling MS Israel it’s OK to piss all over the community that they are quietly suffocating anyway. The MVP case MS Israel has managed to screw the MVP program as well. MS MVPs (I’m one) have had a tough time here in Israel the past couple of years. ever since yosi taguri left the blue badge ranks, there was not real community leader left. Whoever runs things right now has their eyes and minds set elsewhere, with the software MVP community far from mind and heart. No special MVP events (except a couple of small ones this year). No real MVP leadership happens here, with the MVP MEA lead (Ruari) being on a remote line, is not really what’s needed. “MVP? What’s that?” I’m sure many MS Israel employees would say. Exactly my point. Last word I’ve been disappointed by the MS machine for a while now, but their slowness to realize what real community means in the past couple of years really turns me off. Maybe it’s time to move on. Maybe I shouldn’t be chasing people at MS Israel begging for a room to host the Agile Israel user group. Maybe it’s time to say a big bye bye and start looking at a life a bit more disconnected.

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• Oracle Cloud Hiring Event at Oracle in Redwood on November 9th

  - by user769227

  Wow, 24 hours to go until Cloud Hire 2012 at Oracle! Friday is going to be a great day for many looking to make a life and career changing move. In case you haven’t heard, Oracle is hosting Cloud Hire 2012 this Friday, November 9, at the Oracle Conference Center on our World Wide Headquarters campus in Redwood Shores. This is a one-of-a-kind event to be sure and we are still registering online! We are aggressively expanding our Cloud Development and Product Management organizations to meet to ever-growing demand for Oracle Cloud. And, from this event alone, we are hoping to hire 25+ Developers, Inbound and Outbound Product Managers, Technical Leaders and QA Engineers across several Oracle Cloud groups, including: · Data and Insight Services: Big Data as a Service/Business Directory · Cloud Infrastructure · Application Marketplace · Cloud Portal · Product Management and Marketing: Outbound/Inbound · Testing/Quality Assurance · Cloud Social Platform: Analytics, Media, Big Data, Text Analytics, High Performance Search, · Cloud Social Platform - Social Relationship Management: Mobile Development/Social Network Integrations Why attend this event? Just Google Larry Ellison’s 2012 OpenWorld keynote address and you will learn why! Oracle Cloud is growing every day and we are scaling, adding new products and revolutionizing and improving all areas of the Oracle Cloud. There is no company that can come close to the comprehensive product lineup, services, capabilities and global reach and delivery of Oracle’s Cloud. This why it is a great time to work for Oracle: where consistent, stable financial growth rules and high impact technological advances are occurring every day. If you are serious about managing an upward, expansive path in your career, while staying on the leading edge and making big career impacts, you should join Oracle. Whether you want to design and develop or manage Social, Infrastructure or Applications in the Cloud, you can do it all at Oracle. Whether you’re a Technical Leader, Developer, Architect or Product Manager/Strategist, we are hiring now! Come check us out on Friday, November 9 in-person and see why Oracle Cloud is the place to take your career! RSVP here: and Learn more about the hiring teams in attendance here. Here are just some of the big things happening on Friday, November 9: · 830-3pm: Registration/Refreshments, Oracle Conference Center, 350 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, CA (free parking) · 9am – 3pm: Ongoing Hiring Team Discussions and Product Demos include: Social Marketing, Social Engagement, Social Monitoring, Insight / View, KPI Bundles, Business Directory, Virtualization, Messaging, Provisioning, Cloud Portal · 10:30am – Speaker: Gopalan Arun, Vice President, Oracle Cloud Development Bio: Arun has been with Oracle for 18 years+. He is a testament to the stability and career growth that you can achieve working for Oracle. Arun began as a Developer and ascended through several product organizations into key leadership roles. Over his 18 years at Oracle, he has built and shipped many Database and Middleware products. Arun is one of the founding members of the Oracle Cloud and currently leads the development of many of the core infrastructure and developer-facing services of the Oracle Cloud. Topic: Oracle Cloud for the Developer · 1pm – Speaker: Naresh Revanuru, Lead Architect, Oracle Cloud Bio: Naresh is currently leading Java, Storage and Compute services for Oracle Cloud. Naresh also helps drive decisions for broad based Cloud topics that affect multiple services. http://www.linkedin.com/in/nareshrevanuru Topic: Oracle Cloud Architectural Overview and Challenges to Solve · 1pm-3pm: Ongoing Hiring Team Discussions and Product Demos

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• Do MORE with WebCenter

  - by Michael Snow

  We’ve been extremely busy here on the Oracle WebCenter team. We hope that you’ve all be keeping up with the interesting news each week. Last week was jammed full of GartnerPCC and Gartner360 buzz. If you missed any of the highlights – be sure to check out both Kellsey’s post from last week: Gartner PCC: A Shovel & Some Ah-Ha's and Christie’s overview of Loren Weinberg’s PCC presentation: "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Engage Your Customers or Lose Them"  . This week, we’ll be focusing on “Doing More with WebCenter” leading up to a great webcast scheduled for Thursday, March 22 (invite and registration link below). This is the 2nd in a series of 3 webcasts dedicated to expanding the understanding of the full capabilities of WebCenter. Yes – that might mean that you are not getting the full benefits of the software you already own or the expansion potential via upgrade to the full WebCenter Suite Plus. Tune in on Thursday 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET.  ++++++++++++++ Want to be a Speaker at Oracle OpenWorld 2012? Oracle Open World planning has already kicked off. We know that it is only March and next October is far in the distance. But planning has already started for Oracle OpenWorld 2012. So if you want to be a speaker and propose your own session for this year's event in San Francisco on September 30th - October 4th, starting thinking now!  The annual OpenWorld Call for Papers is now open until April 9th! All of the details to submit a paper are available here. Of course, the WebCenter team here is interested in sessions including case studies, thought-leadership, customer stories around any of the Oracle WebCenter solutions, but the Call for Papers is open to all Oracle topics. When submitting your topic, be sure to describe what you plan to discuss and the value of the presentation to other attendees. Sell your session, because there will be a lot of competition to be selected.  Bonus News: Speakers for selected sessions receive a complimentary full conference pass! Get your papers in and we'll see you in San Francisco! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Webcast Series: Do More with Oracle WebCenter - Expand Beyond Content Management Enable Employees, Partners, and Customers to Do More with Your Content Dear [FIRSTNAME] [LASTNAME],-- Did you know that, in addition to content management, Oracle WebCenter now also includes comprehensive portal, composite application, collaboration, and Web experience management capabilities? Join us for this Webcast and learn how you can provide a new level of user engagement. Learn how Oracle WebCenter: Drives task-specific application data and content to a single screen for executing specific business processes Enables mixed internal and external environments where content can be securely shared and filtered with employees, partners, and customers, based upon role-based security Offers Web experience management, driving contextually relevant, social, and interactive online experiences across multiple channels Provides social features that enable sharing, activity feeds, collaboration, expertise location, and best-practices communities Learn how to do more with Oracle WebCenter. Register now for the Webcast. Register Now Join us for the second Webcast in the series "Do More With Oracle WebCenter". March 22, 2012 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET Presented by: Michelle Huff Senior Director, WebCenter Product Management, Oracle Greg Utecht Project Manager,IT Operations,TIES Copyright © 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Contact Us | Legal Notices | Privacy Oracle Corporation - Worldwide Headquarters, 500 Oracle Parkway, OPL - E-mail Services, Redwood Shores, CA 94065, United States

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• Welcome 2011

  - by PSteele

  About this time last year, I wrote a blog post about how January of 2010 was almost over and I hadn’t done a single blog post.  Ugh…  History repeats itself. 2010 in Review If I look back at 2010, it was a great year in terms of technology and development: Visited Redmond to attend the MVP Summit in February.  Had a great time with the MS product teams and got to connect with some really smart people. Continued my work on Visual Studio Magazine’s “C# Corner” column.  About mid-year, the column changed from an every-other-month print column to an every-other-month print column along with bi-monthly web-only articles.  Needless to say, this kept me even busier and away from my blog. Participated in another GiveCamp!  Thanks to the wonderful leadership of Michael Eaton and all of his minions, GiveCamp 2010 was another great success.  Planning for GiveCamp 2011 will be starting soon… I switched to DVCS full time.  After years of being a loyal SVN user, I got bit by the DVCS bug.  I played around with both Mercurial and Git and finally settled on Mercurial.  It’s seamless integration with Windows Explorer along with it’s wealth of plugins made me fall in love.  I can’t imagine going back and using a centralized version control system. Continued to work with the awesome group of talent at SRT Solutions.  Very proud that SRT won it’s third consecutive FastTrack award! Jumped off the BlackBerry train and enjoying the smooth ride of Android.  It was time to replace the old BlackBerry Storm so I did some research and settled on the Motorola DroidX.  I couldn’t be happier.  Android is a slick OS and the DroidX is a sweet piece of hardware.  Been dabbling in some Android development with both Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA (I like IntelliJ IDEA a lot better!).   2011 Plans On January 1st I was pleasantly surprised to get an email from the Microsoft MVP program letting me know that I had received the MVP award again for my community work in 2010.  I’m honored and humbled to be recognized by Microsoft as well as my peers! I’ll continue to do some Android development.  I’m currently working on a simple app to get me feet wet.  It may even makes it’s way into the Android Market. I’ve got a project that could really benefit from WPF so I’ll be diving into WPF this year.  I’ve played around with WPF a bit in the past – simple demos and learning exercises – but this will give me a chance to build an entire application in WPF.  I’m looking forward to the increased freedom that a WPF UI should give me. I plan on blogging a lot more in 2011! Technorati Tags: Android,MVP,Mercurial,WPF,SRT,GiveCamp

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• So You Want to Be a Social Media Director

  - by Mike Stiles

  Do you want to be a Social Media Director? Some say the title is already losing its relevance; that social should be a basic skill that is required and used no matter what your position is inside the enterprise. I suppose that’s visionary, and a fun thing for thought leaders to say. But in the vast majority of business organizations, we’re so far away from that reality that the thought of not having someone driving social’s implementation and guiding its proper usage conjures up images of anarchy. That said, social media has become so broad, so catch-all, and so extended across business functions, that today’s Social Media Director, depending on the size of their staff, must make jacks-of-all-trades look like one-trick-ponies. Just as the purview of the CMO has grown all-encompassing, the disciplines required of their heads of social are stacking up. Master of Content Every social pipeline you build must stay filled, with quantity and quality. Content takes time, and the job never stops. Never. And no, it’s not true that anybody can write. Master of Customer Experience You must have a passion for hearing from customers and making them really happy. Master of PR You must know how to communicate and leverage the trust you’ve built when crises strike. Couldn’t hurt to be a Master of Politics. Master of Social Technology So many social management tools on the market. You have to know what social tech ecosystem makes sense and avoid piecemeal point solutions. Master of Business Development Social for selling and prospecting is hot, and you have to know how to use social to do it. Master of Analytics Nothing else matters if you can’t prove social is helping the brand. That’s right, creative content guy has to also be a math and stats geek. Good luck with that. Master of Paid Media You’ve got to learn the language, learn the tactics, learn the vendors and learn how to measure results. Master of Education Guess who gets to teach everyone who has no clue how to use social for business. Master of Personal Likability You’ll be leading the voice, tone, image and personality of the brand. If you don’t instinctively know how to be liked by actual people, the brand will be starting from a deficit. How deep must you go in this parade of masteries? Again, that depends on your employer’s maturity level in social. Serious players recognize these as distinct disciplines requiring true experts for maximum effect. Less serious players will need you to execute personally in many of these areas. Do the best you can, and try to grow quickly at each. If you’re the sole person executing all social…well…you’re in the game of managing expectations and trying to socially educate your employer. The good news is, you should be making a certifiable killing. If you’re alone and your salary is modest, time to understand how many brands out there crave what you’ve mastered. Not to push back against thought leaders, but the need for brand social leadership has not gone away…not even a little bit. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Stefan Wagner, freeimages.com

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• My Experience at Oracle !!! By Ayush Gupta

  - by Nadiya

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Hi! My name is Ayush, a Gratuate from BITS Pilani and now working and living in Bangalore. I joined Oracle in August 2013 as a Senior Consultant (SC) and would like to share my experiences over the first couple of months with you.It has been a wonderful journey so far. The last two months have been very exciting for me. First of all I would like to mention that the training program at Oracle that we went through really prepared us well. It matured us and allowed us to go from developing small applications in college to big enterprise products. Two months of initial training has had a lasting impact for me. I am also really enjoying the knowledge I have gained so far and also learning new things in the form of product training. It's really fun to work here. We are treated like adults and we are responsible for our own workloads.With that I can't keep from mentioning the fun times we as a team have in the form of Young Leadership programme in Hotel Fortune Trinity which included Luxurious buffet lunch too. Wishing it could happen more frequently.  Oracle provides one of the best opportunities to learn various technologies across different platforms. What I like best about working at Oracle is the work life balance. With the option of flexible timings, one can easily enjoy planned evenings with friends or maybe working out at the fitness centre in your building. Be it the birthday celebrations at office or the day long team outing at a resort, It’s all together a different experience. Overall, you get to take full ownership of your project and they give you a free leash on how you design your enhancements/changes.As one of the largest international companies, Oracle is obviously an expert on exploring the potential and possibility of inexperienced new hires. We were taught how to make an outstanding team work in a group training session at the first few weeks. From this experience I realized that perfect cooperation is not about where you come from or what your study background is, everyone can find his or her own role to support the team. Even though I am not that skilled in technology, my background has significantly helped me in learning new technologies in Oracle.My idea and suggestion is: for new joiners, the will to learn is be more important than what you have learnt before. Colleagues here at Oracle are professionals in their field, always friendly and glad to help. So don’t worry, all you need to do is just be confident, and have a nice attitude, Oracle will let you fully display your talent. Come and join us, here you can always find a tailor made role for you! /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Unlocking High Performance with Policy Administration Replacement

  - by helen.pitts(at)oracle.com

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-CA; mso-fareast-language:EN-CA;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-CA; mso-fareast-language:EN-CA;} It is clear the insurance industry is undergoing significant changes as it consolidates and prepares for growth. The increasing focus on customer centricity, enhanced and speedier product development capabilities, and compliance with regulatory changes has forced companies to rethink well-entrenched policy administration processes. In previous Oracle Insurance blogs I’ve highlighted industry research pointing to policy administration replacement as a top IT priority for carriers. It is predicted that by 2013, the global IT spend on policy administration alone is likely to be almost 22 percentage of the total insurance IT spend. To achieve growth, insurers are adopting new pricing models, enhancing distribution reach, and quickly launching new products and services—all of which depend on agile and effective policy administration processes and technologies. Next month speakers from Oracle Insurance and Capgemini Financial Services will discuss how insurers can competitively drive high performance through policy administration replacement during a free, one-hour webcast hosted by LOMA. Roger Soppe, Oracle senior director, Insurance Strategy, together with Capgemini’s Lars Ernsting, leader, Life & Pensions COE, and Scott Mampre, vice president, Insurance, will be the speakers. Specifically, they’ll be highlighting: How replacing a legacy policy administration system with a modern, flexible platform optimizes IT and operations costs, creates consistent processes and eliminates resource redundancies How selecting the right partner with the best blend of technology, operational, and consulting capabilities, is an important pre-requisite to unlock high performance from policy administration transformation to achieve product, operational, and cost leadership  The value of outsourcing closed block operations We look forward to your participation on Thursday, July 14, 11:00 a.m. ET. Please register now. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance's life and annuities solutions.

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• Nominations now open for the Oracle FMW Excellence Awards 2014

  - by Greg Jensen

  2014 Oracle Excellence Award NominationsWho Is the Innovative Leader for Identity Management? •    Is your organization leveraging one of Oracle’s Identity and Access Management solutions in your production environment?•    Are you a leading edge organization that has adopted a forward thinking approach to Identity and Access Management processes across the organization?•    Are you ready to promote and highlight the success of your deployment to your peers? •    Would you a chance to win FREE registration to Oracle OpenWorld 2014? Oracle is pleased to announce the call for nominations for the 2014 Oracle Excellence Awards: Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation.  The Oracle Excellence Awards for Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation honor organizations using Oracle Fusion Middleware to deliver unique business value.  This year, the awards will recognize customers across nine distinct categories, including Identity and Access Management.  Oracle customers, who feel they are pioneers in their implementation of at least one of the Oracle Identity and Access Management offerings in a production environment or active deployment, should submit a nomination.  If submitted by June 20th, 2014, you will have a chance to win a FREE registration to Oracle OpenWorld 2014 (September 28 - October 2) in San Francisco, CA.  Top customers will be showcased at Oracle OpenWorld and featured in Oracle publications.   The  Identity and Access Management Nomination Form Additional benefits to nomineesNominating your organization opens additional opportunities to partner with Oracle such as:•    Promotion of your Customer Success StoriesProvides a platform for you to share the success of your initiatives and programs to peer groups raising the overall visibility of your team and your organization as a leader in security•    Social Media promotion (Video, Blog & Podcast)Reach the masses of Oracle’s customers through sharing of success stories, or customer created blog content that highlights the advanced thought leadership role in security with co-authored articles on Oracle Blog page that reaches close to 100,000 subscribers. There are numerous options to promote activities on Facebook, Twitter and co-branded activities using Video and Audio. •    Live speaking opportunities to your peersAs a technology leader within your organization, you can represent your organization at Oracle sponsored events (online, in person or webcasts) to help share the success of your organizations efforts building out your team/organization brand and success. •    Invitation to the IDM Architect ForumOracle is able to invite the right customers into the IDM Architect Forum which is an invite only group of customers that meet monthly to hear technology driven presentations from their own peers (not from Oracle) on today’s trends.  If you want to hear privately what some of the most successful companies in every industry are doing about security, this is the forum to be in. All presentations are private and remain within the forum, and only members can see take advantage of the lessons gained from these meetings.  To date, there are 125 members. There are many more advantages to partnering with Oracle, however, it can start with the simple nomination form for Identity and Access Management category of the 2014 Oracle Excellence Award Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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• The Evolution of Oracle Direct EMEA by John McGann

  - by user769227

  John is expanding his Dublin based team and is currently recruiting a Director with marketing and sales leadership experience: http://bit.ly/O8PyDF Should you wish to apply, please send your CV to [email protected] Hi, my name is John McGann and I am part of the Oracle Direct management team, based in Dublin.   Today I’m writing from the Oracle London City office, right in the heart of the financial district and up to very recently at the centre of a fantastic Olympic Games. The Olympics saw individuals and teams from across the globe competing to decide who is Citius, Altius, Fortius - “Faster, Higher, Stronger" There are lots of obvious parallels between the competitive world of the Olympics and the Business environments that many of us operate in, but there are also some interesting differences – especially in my area of responsibility within Oracle. We are of course constantly striving to be the best - the best solution on offer for our clients, bringing simplicity to their management, consumption and application of information technology, and the best provider when compared with our many niche competitors.   In Oracle and especially in Oracle Direct, a key aspect of how we achieve this is what sets us apart from the Olympians.  We have long ago eliminated geographic boundaries as a limitation to what we can achieve. We assemble the strongest individuals across multiple countries and bring them together in teams focussed on a single goal. One such team is the Oracle Direct Sales Programs team. In case you don’t know, Oracle Direct EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa) is the inside sales division in Oracle and it is where I started my Oracle career.  I remember that my first role involved putting direct mail in envelopes.... things have moved on a bit since then – for me, for Oracle Direct and in how we interact with our customers. Today, the team of over 1000 people is located in the different Oracle Direct offices around Europe – the main ones are Malaga, Berlin, Prague and Dubai plus the headquarters in Dublin. We work in over 20 languages and are in constant contact with current and future Oracle customers, using the latest internet and telephone technologies to effectively communicate and collaborate with each other, our customers and prospects. One of my areas of responsibility within Oracle Direct is the Sales Programs team. This team of 25 people manages the planning and execution of demand generation, leading the process of finding new and incremental revenue within Oracle Direct. The Sales Programs Managers or ‘SPMs’ are embedded within each of the Oracle Direct sales teams, focussed on distinct geographies or product groups. The SPMs are virtual members of the regional sales management teams, and work closely with the sales and marketing teams to define and deliver demand generation activities. The customer contact elements of these activities are executed via the Oracle Direct Sales and Business Development/Lead Generation teams, to deliver the pipeline required to meet our revenue goals. Activities can range from pan-EMEA joint sales and marketing campaigns, to very localised niche campaigns. The campaigns might focus on particular segments of our existing customers, introducing elements of our evolving solution portfolio which customers may not be familiar with. The Sales Programs team also manages ‘Nurture’ activities to ensure that we develop potential business opportunities with contacts and organisations that do not have immediate requirements. Looking ahead, it is really important that we continue to evolve our ability to add value to our clients and reduce the physical limitations of our distance from them through the innovative application of technology. This enables us to enhance the customer buying experience and to enable the Inside Sales teams to manage ever more complex sales cycles from start to finish.  One of my expectations of my team is to actively drive innovation in how we leverage data to better understand our customers, and exploit emerging technologies to better communicate with them.   With the rate of innovation and acquisition within Oracle, we need to ensure that existing and potential customers are aware of all we have to offer that relates to their business goals.   We need to achieve this via a coherent communication and sales strategy to effectively target the right people using the most effective medium. This is another area where the Sales Programs team plays a key role.

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• It’s official – Red Gate is a great place to work!

  - by red@work

  At a glittering award ceremony last week, we found out that we’re officially the 14th best small company to work for in the whole of the UK! This is no mean feat, considering that about 1,000 companies enter the Sunday Times Top 100 best companies awards each year. Most of these are in the small companies category too. It's the fourth year in a row for us to be in the Top 100 list and we're tickled pink because the results are based on employee opinion. We’re particularly proud to be the best small company in Cambridge (in the whole of East Anglia, in fact) and the best small software development company in the entire UK. So how does it all work? Well, 90% of us took the time to answer over 70 questions on categories such as management, benefits, wellbeing, leadership, giving something back and what we think of Red Gate as a whole. It makes you think about every part of day to day working life and how you feel about it. Do you slightly or strongly agree or disagree that your manager motivates your to do your best every day, or that you have confidence in Red Gate's leaders, or that you’re not spending too much time working? It's great to see that we had one of the best scores in the country for the question "Do you think your company takes advantage of you?" We got particularly high scores for management, wellbeing and for giving something back too. A few of us got dressed up and headed to London for the awards; very excited about where we’d place but slightly nervous about having to get up on stage. There was a last minute hic up with a bow tie but the Managing Editor of the Sunday Times kindly stepped in to offer his assistance just before we had our official photo taken. We were nominated for two Special Recognition Awards. Despite not bringing them home this year, we're very proud to be nominated as there are only three nominations in each category. First we were up for the Training and Development award. Best Companies loved that we get together at lunchtimes to teach each other photography, cookery and French, as well as our book clubs and techie talks. And of course they liked our opportunities to go on training courses and to jet off to international conferences. Our other nomination was for the Wellbeing award. Best Companies loved our free food (and let’s face it, so do we). Porridge or bacon sandwiches for breakfast, a three course hot dinner, and free fruit and cereals all day long. If all that has an affect on the waistline then there are plenty of sporty activities for us all to get involved in, such as yoga, running or squash. Or if that’s not your thing then a relaxing massage helps us all to unwind every few months or so. The awards were hosted by news presenter Kate Silverton. She gave us a special mention during the ceremony for having great customer engagement as well as employee engagement, after we told her about Rodney Landrum (a Friend of Red Gate) tattooing our logo on his arm. We showed off our customised dinner jacket (thanks to Dom from Usability) with a flashing Red Gate logo on the back and she seemed suitability impressed. Back in the office the next day, we popped open the champagne and raised a glass to our success. Neil, our joint CEO, talked about how pleased he was with the award because it's based on the opinions of the people that count – us. You can read more about the Sunday Times awards here. By the way, we're still growing and are still hiring. If you’d like to keep up with our latest vacancies then why not follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/redgatecareers. Right now we're busy hiring in development, test, sales, product management, web development, and project management. Here's a link to our current job opportunities page – we'd love to hear from great people who are looking for a great place to work! After all, we're only great because of the people who work here. Post by: Alice Chapman

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• Cloud Apps News @#OOW12

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  All eyes were on Oracle this past week and the news cycle was in full swing. What better time to make some key announcements that were guaranteed to create buzz ... and so we did. The name of the game was Cloud! Here are the key Cloud announcements for Apps, which included Fusion Tap that enables mobility across all Cloud Apps, HCM customer momentum in the Cloud, and our very first ERP Cloud Services customer. Oracle Unveils Oracle Fusion Tap for the iPadOracle Fusion Tap - Productivity Amplified Anywhere, Anytime "Both the enterprise and technology providers must recognize the need to innovate and adapt for the increasing mobility of the workforce - not just for sales teams, but across the organization," said Carter Lusher, Research Fellow and Chief Analyst of Enterprise Applications Ecosystem, Ovum. "A mobile application that quickly and powerfully allows employees to make connections, analyze data, and complete activities at any time and wherever they may be located drives new levels of business value and enhances efficiency. Frankly, mobile access is no longer a 'nice to have' but a 'must have.'"  "The mobile workforce is a business reality, and Oracle Fusion Tap is an example of how Oracle delivers mobile and cloud innovations that fundamentally improve productivity and how we work," said Chris Leone, Senior Vice President of Application Development, Oracle. "With Oracle Fusion Tap users will have an all-in-one, easily extensible app that puts mission-critical data and colleague connection at their fingertips." The entire release is available here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1855392 Customers Live on Oracle Fusion Human Capital ManagementOracle HCM Cloud Service Helps Power HR's Contribution to the Business "More than 25 of the 100-plus customers who have selected Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) are already live. Ardent Leisure, Peach Aviation, Toshiba Medical Systems and Zillow have deployed Oracle HCM Cloud Service and are using it to transform their HR operations. They join companies such as Principal Financial Group and Elizabeth Arden, who are already using Oracle HCM Cloud Service to help manage international growth and deliver pervasive, role-based, configurable solutions to their employees. With these recent go-lives, Oracle takes a leading position in successfully bringing live HCM customers in the cloud."  "As a technology company, Zillow looked to a partner who could scale with us. Zillow has gone live on Oracle HCM Cloud Service, which will give us the ability automate and streamline HR operations for our employees in the near future," said Sarah Bilton, Senior Director HR, Zillow. Read the entire release here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1859573 Lending Club Selects Oracle ERP Cloud Service to Help Increase Insight and EfficienciesOracle ERP Cloud Service Provides an Open Architecture, Best-of-Breed Decision-Making, and Scalability in the Cloud "Lending Club, the leading platform for investing in and obtaining personal loans, has selected Oracle ERP Cloud Service to help improve decision-making and workflow, implement robust reporting, and take advantage of the inherent scalability and cost savings provided by the cloud. With more than 76,000 borrowers and 90,000 investors Lending Club utilizes technology and innovation to reduce the cost of traditional banking and offer borrowers better rates and investors better returns.  After an extensive search, Lending Club selected Oracle ERP Cloud Service due to the breadth and depth of capabilities and ongoing innovation of Oracle ERP Cloud Service, as well as Oracle's open architecture, industry leadership and commitment to partners." "Lending Club is an innovative, data-intensive, high-growth company and we needed a solution and partner that could match us," said Carrie Dolan, CFO, Lending Club. "We conducted a thorough review of our options, and Oracle ERP Cloud Service was the clear winner in terms of capabilities and business value as well as commitment to us as a customer." Read the entire release here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1859020

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• History of Mobile Technology

  - by David Dorf

  Over the last ten years, mobile phones have gone through several incremental technology leaps that have added capabilities that impact the retail industry.  I've listed the six major ones below, along with their long-lasting impact. 1. Location In the US, the FCC required mobile phones to implement E911 (emergency calls) by 2006, requiring the caller to be located to within 300 meters.  Back in 2000, GPS was opened up for civilian use, and by 2004 Qualcomm had figured out how to use GPS in mobile phones.  So mobile operators moved from cell tower triangulation to GPS, principally for E911.  But then lots of other uses became apparent, especially navigation.  The earliest mobile apps from retailers made it easy to find nearby stores, and companies are looking at ways to use WiFi triangulation inside stores. 2. Computer Vision In 1997 Philippe Kahn shared a photo of his newborn using a mobile phone thus launching the popularity of instant visual communications.  Over the years the quality of the cameras got better, reaching the point where barcodes could be read around 2008.  That's when Occipital came on the scene with their Red Laser application, which was eventually acquired by eBay.  This opened up the ability for consumers to easily price compare inside stores.  Other interesting apps included Tesco's Wine Finder and Amazon's Price Checker, both allowing products to be identified by picture. 3. Augmented Reality Once the mobile phone had GPS, a video camera, and compass functionality it was suddenly possible to overlay digital information on the screen in real-time.  Yelp, which was using GPS to find nearby merchants, created a backdoor called Monocle on the iPhone that showed nearby merchants overlayed on the video camera view.  Today AR apps are mostly used by retailers for marketing, like Moosejaw's app that undresses models in their catalog. 4. Geo-Fencing So if we're able to track the location of a mobile phone, why not use that context to offer timely information?  My first experience with geo-fencing came courtesy of North Face, the outdoor enthusiast store. When a mobile phone enters a predetermined area, like near a store, a text message is sent to phone with an offer or useful information.  Of course retailers can geo-fence their competitors as well and find out which customers are aren't so loyal. 5. Digital Wallet Mobile payments leverage different technologies such as NFC, QRCodes, bluetooth, and SMS to facilitate communication between the consumers's phone and the retailer's point-of-sale. The key here is the potential to consolidate loyalty cards, coupons, and bank cards into the mobile phone and enable faster checkout.  Nobody does this better than Starbucks today, but McDonald's and Duncan Donuts aren't far behind.  Google, Isis, Paypal, Square, and MCX are all vying for leadership in this area.  If NFC does finally take off, it will be leveraged by retailers in more places than just the POS. 6. Voice Response Mobile Phones have had the ability to interpret simple voice commands for a while, but Google and Amazon were the first to use voice to allow searches for products.  Allowing searches by text, barcode, and voice makes it easy to comparison shop in the aisles.  Walmart even uses voice to build shopping lists, and if the Siri API is even opened we could see lots more innovation in this area.

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• Why don't we just fix Javascript?

  - by Jan Meyer

  Javascript sucks because of a few fatalities well pointed out by Douglas Crockford. We talk a lot about it. But the point here is, why we don't fix it? Coffeescript of course does that and a lot more. But the question here is another: if we provide a webservice that can convert one version of Javascript to the next, and so on, we can keep the language up to date. Such a conversion allows old code to run, albeit with an ever-increasing startup delay, as newer browsers convert old code to the new syntax. To avoid that delay, the site only needs to take the output of the code-transform and paste it in! The effort has immediate benefits for those businesses interested in the results. The rest can sleep tight: their code will continue to run. If we provide backward code-transformation also, then elder browsers can also run ANY new code! Migration scripts should be created by those that make changes to a language. Today they don't, which is in itself a fundamental omission! It should be am obvious part of their job to provide them, as their job isn't really done without them. The onus of making it work should be on them. With this system Any site will be able to run in Any browser, but new code will run best on the newest browsers. This way we reap the benefit of an up-to-date and productive development environment, where today we suffer, supposedly because of yesterday. This is a misconception. We are all trapped in committee-thinking, and we drag along things that only worsen our performance over time! We cause an ever increasing complexity that is hard to underestimate. Javascript is easily fixed. The fact is we don't. As an example, I have seen Patrick Michaud tackle the migration problem in PmWiki. It included forward migration scripts. Whenever syntax changes were made, a migration script was added to transform pages to the new syntax. As far as I know, ALL migrations have worked flawlessly. In other words, we don't tackle the migration problem, we just drag it along. We are incompetent! And why is that? Because technically incompetent people feel they must decide for us. Because they are incompetent, fear rules them. They are obnoxiously conservative, and we suffer the consequence of bad leadership. But the competent don't need to play by the same rules. They can (and must) change them. They are the path forward. It is about time to leave the past behind, and pursue the leanest meanest, no, eternal functionality. That would in and of itself revolutionize programming. So, why don't we stop whining and fix programming? Begin with Javascript and change the world. Even if the browser doesn't hook into this system, coders could. So language updaters should take it upon them to provide migration scripts. Once they exist, browsers may take advantage of them.

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• Lead, Follow, or Get out of the way

  - by Daniel Moth

  This is one of the sayings (attributed to Thomas Paine) that totally resonated with me from the first time I heard it, which was only 3 years ago during some training course at work: "Lead, Follow, or Get out of the way" You'll find many books with this title and you'll find it quoted by politicians and other leaders in various countries at various times... the quote is open to interpretation and works on many levels. To set the tone of what this means to me, I'll use a simple micro example: In any given conversation, you are either leading it or following it, at different times/snapshots of the conversation. If you are not willing or able to lead it, and you are not willing or able to follow it, then you should depart. The bad alternative which this guidance encourages you NOT to do is to stick around and obstruct progress by not following, not leading, and simply complaining or trying to derail the discussion in no particular direction. The same pattern applies at your position/role at work. Either follow your management/leadership team, or try to lead them to what you think is a better place, or change jobs. Don't stick around complaining about the direction things are going, while not actively trying to either change things or make peace with it. In the previous paragraph you can replace the word "your management" with "the people reporting to you" and the guidance still holds. Either lead your direct reports to where you think they should go, or follow their lead, or change jobs. Complaining about folks not taking direction while doing nothing is not a maintainable state. To me this quote is not about a permanent state, it is not about some people always leading and some always following: It is about a role/hat that anybody can play/wear at any given moment. One minute I am leading you, the next I am following you, and the next we are both following someone else and so on... When there is disagreement, debate the different directions for as long as it takes for you to be comfortable that you can either follow or lead. If you don't become comfortable with either of those, get out of the way. Something to remember is that it is impossible to learn how to lead well, without learning how to follow well (probably deserves its own blog entry)... Things go wrong when someone thinks that they must always be leading, or when everybody wants to follow and nobody steps up to lead... Things go wrong when more than one person wants to lead and they don't try to reach agreement on a shared direction, stubbornly sticking to their guns pulling the rest of the team in multiple directions... Things go wrong when more than one person wants to lead and after numerous and lengthy discussions, none of them decides to follow or get out of the way... Things go wrong when people don't want to lead, don't want to follow, and insist on sticking around... While there are a few ways things that can go wrong as enumerated in the previous paragraph, the most common one in my experience is the last one I mentioned. You'll recognize these folks as the ones that always complain about everything that is wrong with their company/product but do nothing about it. Every time you hear someone giving feedback on how something is wrong or suboptimal, ask them "So now that you identified the problem, what do you think the solution is and what are you doing to drive us to that solution?" The next time things start going wrong, step up and remind everyone: Lead, Follow, or Get out of the way. For more perspectives, and for input to help you form your own interpretation, search the web for this phrase to see in what contexts it is being used (bing, google). Finally, regardless of your political views, I hope you can appreciate if only as an example this perspective of someone leading by actually getting out of the way. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Get to Know a Candidate (3 of 25): Virgil Goode&ndash;Constitution Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Meet Virgil Goode of the Constitution Party Goode was served as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from 1997 to 2009. He represented the 5th congressional district of Virginia. Goode was born in Richmond, Virginia, the son of Alice Clara (née Besecker) and Virgil Hamlin Goode. He has spent most of his life in Rocky Mount. Goode graduated with a B.A. from the University of Richmond (Phi Beta Kappa) and with a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He also is a member of Lambda Chi Alpha Fraternity and served in the Army National Guard from 1969 to 1975. Goode grew up as a Democrat. He entered politics soon after graduating from law school. At the age of 27, he won a special election to the state Senate from a Southside district as an independent after the death of the Democratic incumbent. One of his major campaign focuses at the time was advocacy for the Equal Rights Amendment. Soon after being elected, he joined the Democrats. Goode wore his party ties very loosely. He became famous for his support of the tobacco industry, expressing his fear that "his elderly mother would be denied 'the one last pleasure' of smoking a cigarette on her hospital deathbed." He was an ardent defender of gun rights while being an enthusiastic supporter of L. Douglas Wilder, who later became the first elected black governor in the history of the United States. At the Democratic Party's state political convention in 1985, Goode nominated Wilder for lieutenant governor. However, while governor, Wilder cracked down on the sale of guns in the state. After the 1995 elections resulted in a 20–20 split between Democrats and Republicans in the State Senate, Goode seriously considered voting with the Republicans on organizing the chamber. Had he done so, the State Senate would have been under Republican control for the first time since Reconstruction (the Republicans ultimately won control outright in 1999). Goode's actions at the time "forced his party to share power with Republican lawmakers in the state legislature," which further upset the Democratic Party. Goode is on the ballot in CA, FL, ID, IO, LA, MI, MN, MS, MI, NJ, NM, NY, NV, ND, OH, SC, SD, TN, UT, VA, WA, WI, WY.  He is a write-in candidate in CA, CT, DC, GA, IL, IN, ME, MD, MA, MO, NC, TX, VT, WV Constitution Party This party was founded as the “U.S. Taxpayers’ Party” and considers itself conservative. The party's platform is predicated on the principles of the nation's founding documents. The party puts a large focus on immigration, calling for stricter penalties towards illegal immigrants and a moratorium on legal immigration until all federal subsidies to immigrants are discontinued.The party absorbed the American Independent Party, originally founded for George Wallace's 1968 presidential campaign. The American Independent Party of California has been an affiliate of the Constitution Party since its founding; however, current party leadership is disputed and the issue is in court to resolve this conflict. The Constitution Party has some substantial support from the Christian Right and in 2010 achieved major party status in Colorado. Learn more about Virgil Goode and Constitution Party on Wikipedia.

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• An Actionable Common Approach to Federal Enterprise Architecture

  - by TedMcLaughlan

  The recent “Common Approach to Federal Enterprise Architecture” (US Executive Office of the President, May 2 2012) is extremely timely and well-organized guidance for the Federal IT investment and deployment community, as useful for Federal Departments and Agencies as it is for their stakeholders and integration partners. The guidance not only helps IT Program Planners and Managers, but also informs and prepares constituents who may be the beneficiaries or otherwise impacted by the investment. The FEA Common Approach extends from and builds on the rapidly-maturing Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF) and its associated artifacts and standards, already included to a large degree in the annual Federal Portfolio and Investment Management processes – for example the OMB’s Exhibit 300 (i.e. Business Case justification for IT investments).A very interesting element of this Approach includes the very necessary guidance for actually using an Enterprise Architecture (EA) and/or its collateral – good guidance for any organization charged with maintaining a broad portfolio of IT investments. The associated FEA Reference Models (i.e. the BRM, DRM, TRM, etc.) are very helpful frameworks for organizing, understanding, communicating and standardizing across agencies with respect to vocabularies, architecture patterns and technology standards. Determining when, how and to what level of detail to include these reference models in the typically long-running Federal IT acquisition cycles wasn’t always clear, however, particularly during the first interactions of a Program’s technical and functional leadership with the Mission owners and investment planners. This typically occurs as an agency begins the process of describing its strategy and business case for allocation of new Federal funding, reacting to things like new legislation or policy, real or anticipated mission challenges, or straightforward ROI opportunities (for example the introduction of new technologies that deliver significant cost-savings).The early artifacts (i.e. Resource Allocation Plans, Acquisition Plans, Exhibit 300’s or other Business Case materials, etc.) of the intersection between Mission owners, IT and Program Managers are far easier to understand and discuss, when the overlay of an evolved, actionable Enterprise Architecture (such as the FEA) is applied.  “Actionable” is the key word – too many Public Service entity EA’s (including the FEA) have for too long been used simply as a very highly-abstracted standards reference, duly maintained and nominally-enforced by an Enterprise or System Architect’s office. Refreshing elements of this recent FEA Common Approach include one of the first Federally-documented acknowledgements of the “Solution Architect” (the “Problem-Solving” role). This role collaborates with the Enterprise, System and Business Architecture communities primarily on completing actual “EA Roadmap” documents. These are roadmaps grounded in real cost, technical and functional details that are fully aligned with both contextual expectations (for example the new “Digital Government Strategy” and its required roadmap deliverables - and the rapidly increasing complexities of today’s more portable and transparent IT solutions.  We also expect some very critical synergies to develop in early IT investment cycles between this new breed of “Federal Enterprise Solution Architect” and the first waves of the newly-formal “Federal IT Program Manager” roles operating under more standardized “critical competency” expectations (including EA), likely already to be seriously influencing the quality annual CPIC (Capital Planning and Investment Control) processes.  Our Oracle Enterprise Strategy Team (EST) and associated Oracle Enterprise Architecture (OEA) practices are already engaged in promoting and leveraging the visibility of Enterprise Architecture as a key contributor to early IT investment validation, and we look forward in particular to seeing the real, citizen-centric benefits of this FEA Common Approach in particular surface across the entire Public Service CPIC domain - Federal, State, Local, Tribal and otherwise. Read more Enterprise Architecture blog posts for additional EA insight!

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• College Ratings via the Federal Government

  - by user9147039

  A few weeks back you might remember news about a higher education rating system proposal from the Obama administration. As I've discussed previously, political and stakeholder pressures to improve outcomes and increase transparency are stronger than ever before. The executive branch proposal is intended to make progress in this area. Quoting from the proposal itself, "The ratings will be based upon such measures as: Access, such as percentage of students receiving Pell grants; Affordability, such as average tuition, scholarships, and loan debt; and Outcomes, such as graduation and transfer rates, graduate earnings, and advanced degrees of college graduates.” This is going to be quite complex, to say the least. Most notably, higher ed is not monolithic. From community and other 2-year colleges, to small private 4-year, to professional schools, to large public research institutions…the many walks of higher ed life are, well, many. Designing a ratings system that doesn't wind up with lots of unintended consequences and collateral damage will be difficult. At best you would end up potentially tarnishing the reputation of certain institutions that were actually performing well against the metrics and outcome measures that make sense in their "context" of education. At worst you could spend a lot of time and resources designing a system that would lose credibility with its "customers". A lot of institutions I work with already have in place systems like the one described above. They are tracking completion rates, completion timeframes, transfers to other institutions, job placement, and salary information. As I talk to these institutions there are several constants worth noting: • Deciding on which metrics to measure is complicated. While employment and salary data are relatively easy to track, qualitative measures are more difficult. How do you quantify the benefit to someone who studies in one field that may not compensate him or her as well as another field but that provides huge personal fulfillment and reward is a difficult measure to quantify? • The data is available but the systems to transform the data into actual information that can be used in meaningful ways are not. Too often in higher ed information is siloed. As such, much of the data that need to be a part of a comprehensive system sit in multiple organizations, oftentimes outside the reach of core IT. • Politics and culture are big barriers. One of the areas that my team and I spend a lot of time talking about with higher ed institutions all over the world is the imperative to optimize for student success. This, like the tracking of the students’ achievement after graduation, requires a level or organizational capacity that does not currently exist. The primary barrier is the culture of "data islands" in higher ed, and the need for leadership to drive out the divisions between departments, schools, colleges, etc. and institute academy-wide analytics and data stewardship initiatives that will enable student success. • Data quality is a very big issue. So many disparate systems exist (some on premise, some "in the cloud") that keep data about "persons" using different means to identify them. Establishing a single source of truth about an individual and his or her data is difficult without some type of data quality policy and tools. Good tools actually exist but are seldom leveraged. Don't misunderstand - I think it's a great idea to drive additional transparency and accountability into the system of higher education. And not just at home, but globally. Students and parents need access to key data to make informed, responsible choices. The tools exist to not only enable this kind of information to be shared but to capture the very metrics stakeholders care most about and in a way that makes sense in the context of a given institution's "place" in the overall higher ed panoply.

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• Connection Pool Strategy: Good, Bad or Ugly?

  - by Drew

  I'm in charge of developing and maintaining a group of Web Applications that are centered around similar data. The architecture I decided on at the time was that each application would have their own database and web-root application. Each application maintains a connection pool to its own database and a central database for shared data (logins, etc.) A co-worker has been positing that this strategy will not scale because having so many different connection pools will not be scalable and that we should refactor the database so that all of the different applications use a single central database and that any modifications that may be unique to a system will need to be reflected from that one database and then use a single pool powered by Tomcat. He has posited that there is a lot of "meta data" that goes back and forth across the network to maintain a connection pool. My understanding is that with proper tuning to use only as many connections as necessary across the different pools (low volume apps getting less connections, high volume apps getting more, etc.) that the number of pools doesn't matter compared to the number of connections or more formally that the difference in overhead required to maintain 3 pools of 10 connections is negligible compared to 1 pool of 30 connections. The reasoning behind initially breaking the systems into a one-app-one-database design was that there are likely going to be differences between the apps and that each system could make modifications on the schema as needed. Similarly, it eliminated the possibility of system data bleeding through to other apps. Unfortunately there is not strong leadership in the company to make a hard decision. Although my co-worker is backing up his worries only with vagueness, I want to make sure I understand the ramifications of multiple small databases/connections versus one large database/connection pool.

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