Pythian Group

I found I never published this post as it was sitting in my drafts few months now — it was written in 13th February, 2010. I’m publishing it without any changes.

I learn therefore I am!

I’ve just wrote few bits about learning a new technology and after skimming through my Google Reader, I noticed a great post by Chen Shapira — Deliberate Practice. That’s reminded me about another aspect of learning that I didn’t mention — learning is a continuous process.

There are two aspects…

• No matter how good I am and how much I know, my knowledge and expertize become outdated relatively quickly these days unless I keep up with the new stuff. Unfortunately, there is so much new technologies these days that I have to be very selective on what I want to follow which is a big challenge in itself. On the other hand, I’d rather be challenged than bored. As DBA’s we are luckier than Developers — their world changes much faster than ours.
• I forget things I don’t use/do/read about/think about regularly. Refreshing my “old” memory is a must do. This is why I think Chen’s idea of deliberate practice is so great.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

I spent some time last month getting up to speed on MySQL. One of the nice perks of working at Pythian is the ability to study during the workday. They could have easily said “You are an Oracle DBA, you don’t need to know MySQL. We have enough REAL MySQL experts”, but they didn’t, and I appreciate.

So how does an Oracle DBA goes about learning MySQL?
Obviously you start by reading the docs. Specifically, I looked for the MySQL equivalent of the famous Oracle “Concepts Guide”.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist. I couldn’t find any similar overview of the architecture and the ideas behind the database. The first chapter of “High Performance MySQL” had a high level architecture review, which was useful but being just one chapter in a book, it lacked many of the details I wanted to learn. Peter Zaitsev’s “InnoDB Architecture” presentation had the kind of information I needed – but covered just InnoDB.

Thats really too bad because I definitely feel the lack – which I can easily tell you what Oracle does when you connect to a database, run a select, an update, commit or rollback – I can’t say the same about MySQL. So far I managed without this knowledge, but I have a constant worry that this will come back and bite me later.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Today I’ve read the following email on the mailing list of Sydney Oracle Meetup. I thought that this question is asked many times in attempt to find a silver bullet to learning Oracle so I wanted to publish my reply here on the blog, especially, that I’m a firm believer in one silver bullet that exists — there are no silver bullets.

Hi everybody,

My name is Sebastian and I’m new in the group. Yesterday I arrived late because I had a problem at work at the very last minute. However I found the meeting super interesting.

I’d like to see if someone could give me some piece of advise… I have ZERO experience with Oracle. I’m a Software Engineer and I’ve been working for more than 7 years in development (open source technologies basically). When it comes to DBs, I have some good knowledge about MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server (the only MS product I like). As OS, at the moment I’m working with Linux Ubuntu 9.04.
So, my question is what would be the best way to start working with / studying Oracle?? What can I install to actually have the DBMS running in my laptop and start writing PL/SQL?? Oracle XE??

Then, do you consider I can get any change of getting a internship position (I don’t have much free time) or what would be the best way to get started in this field? I see that ALL the positions require a lot of experience.

Sorry for writing to the whole list about a personal issue. Feel free to write me to my personal email address and thanks everybody.

I look forward to seeing you in the next meet up.

Kind Regards,
Sebastian

Sebastian,

If there is a silver bullet on how to get into new technology field than I don’t know about it. It all depends on personality and what works for you. Read the rest of this entry . . .