Why this blog, internal educations or summer internship programmes?
I have given a two day “application express development” education based on the “2 Day Plus Application Express Developer Guide” and a four day “10g sql statements and application tuning” education based on “Oracle® Database Performance Tuning Guide 10g Release 2 (10.2)” Parts I,II and IV, Thomas Kyte’s Expert-One-On-One and Jonathan Lewis’s Practical Oracle and Cost Based Optimizer Fundamentals books. These are internal educations planned by Turkcell Akademi for Turkcell employees and I am choosen as an internal educator some years ago related on Oracle educations.
My comany is the largest company in Turkey with ~30million customers and ~3000 employees. We use Oracle database on Unix systems. It always suprises me how people behave when learning about the feautes I mention in these internal educations. These features are nothing magic or very unknown really, all of them are mentioned in the strating document for Oracle database Concepts Guide which can be accessed freely from http://tahiti.oracle.com. But it seems that people really does not have a need or want to investigate and read these, the standart acuse is everytime-everybody is very stressed and busy, no time for something new which will make their life easier unfortunately.
So these internal educations are a plathform which I meet with lots of different people with different profiles and backgrounds work on Oracle in their daily work life. I show them how to use Application Express and build web based database apllicaitons in minutes, easily. We talk on 10046/10053 sql trace techniques, autotrace and custom tools like Mr.Kyte’s runstats or Mr.Unal’s itrprof. Also new feautes of 10g like Regular Expressions, dbms_errlog, flashback and recyclebin. Some things which are not new but unfortunately needs mentioning like other table and index types rather than heap table and b*tree, analytical functions, merge and insert all statements, pipelined functions, hierarchical sql, plsql bulk operations, xmltype, large object support, oracle text, intermedia and spatial options and even partitioning and materialized views.
Also fundamental things like using otn, tahiti, installing XE in minutes and using for tests during the education, NULL values and their uncertainities with Oracle and of course Transaction and Exception management techniques. And some things different like “Question Authority” from Mr.Kyte and “Google Search Syndrome”.
These educations are not my primary responsibility but I always work hard for the content because after my six years with Turkcell I believe that it is a must that I have to give this extra time to improve the efficiency by showing employees how Oracle can be effectively used. I use Oracle database and tools for the last 8 years, but I feel like a student still when I read a post in Mr.Lewis blog on CBO, Mr.Kyte’s experimentational answers on asktom or Mr.Feuerstein’s poetry like plsql code. This feeling is very special I know.
Turkcell is one of the biggest customer of Oracle world wide and seeing how this inefficiency is becoming as a company culture is my primary motivation in this fight. Two things made me sad during my recent educations; 1) oracle dba and developers are not coming, attendants are coming from operation groups and their primary focus is writing performant reporting sql statements with tricks like exist versus in or hinting. when I start talking on sql trace or analytical functions this is usually percieved as overloading by most of the group members unfortunately 2) a story begins here; Einstein told one of his collegues one day that if he can make the waiteress surving them understand the relativity theorem only with the material on the table they are having lunch, it is a proof than that he understood all. This comment was shared with me because I am not always able to educate people with making things more simple. This is always in my mind, I know simple is always the best. The challenge is how can I make an analytical function or sql model clause subject simple to be educated. I know this is not impossible, for this challenge I use the experimentation technique of Mr.Kyte’s. I give attendants the chance to experiment the features mentioned on XE they installed on Sql*Plus with simple scnerios mostly taken from tahiti documentation set, otn sample code sections or Mr.Daniel’s library psoug. But last time this also didn’t help, I had several hard time in class, this showed me I need extra time to work on some examples of the education.
So what is the moral of this story than; I must confest that my primary concern is not my company’s inefficiency with my collegues’s limited Oracle knowledge degree, it is my own knowledge degree in fact. It is really a great challenge to work on a topic and educate it or write and publish an articale to internet by knowing that it can be accessed and criticised by Mr.Kyte or Mr.Lewis 
I love this feeling, I love learning, I love sharing. And this is why this blog, internal educations or summer internship programmes are important for me.
After all, I know some of my collegues will read this post and I hope to meet more Oracle dba and developers in the scheduled internal educations for new challenges.