NETVÆRKET

Med OakTable-netværket har Miracle skabt det tungeste netværk der findes indenfor databaseviden, komplet med egen press-label til bøger skrevet af medlemmerne og en medlemsskare, der inkluderer f.eks. Oracle's chef-arkitekt. Hvordan Oak Table netværket kom til verden, kan du læse her:

FROM LITTLE ACORNS....

The genesis of the OakTable Network

In January 2002, Mogens Norgaard of Miracle A/S Denmark invited Jonathan Lewis to present his seminar "Optimising Oracle - Performance by Design" as the Miracle Masterclass 2002.

As a generous and open-hearted individual, Mogens threw out an invitation to various leading lights in the Oracle community to attend the seminar (for entertainment purposes, rather than learning, of course), and this invitation was taken up by, amongst others:

Steve Adams of www.ixora.com fame,
Cary Millsap and Jeff Holt from Hotsos,
Anjo Kolk of www.oraperf.com and YAPP fame
John Beresniewicz from Precise,
James Morle (author of Scaling Oracle 8i) from Scale Abilities,
Stephan Haisley from the Oracle Centre of Excellence in Denver,
Lex de Haan, manager of Advanced Server Curriculum in Oracle Education,
Mogens Nørgaard and others from Miracle A/S in Denmark

Naturally, Danes being the generous hosts that they are, Mogens Norgaard also offered his home to all and sundry, and the evenings regularly degenerated into anarchic, multi-tasking, discussions around Mogens’ dining-room table of how Oracle could, would, or should have worked under different circumstances. And possibly in all those concurrent conversations, perhaps the two most frequent comments were:

"But how do you prove that …"
"But what happens if you modify your test to …"

At some faintly ridiculous hour of the last morning, it dawned on those members of the group that were still awake that they had been through many hours of peer group review, and that there was a great deal of benefit in being able to bounce ideas off other people who thought about, and tested, Oracle in similar ways.

And so, in honour of Mogens’ dining room and the piece of furniture which had supported eleven laptops, 800 metres of cable and numerous bottles for those long nights - the Oak Table Network was born and the domain was registered.

The Oak Table Network is not a commercial organisation; it is a loose association of like-minded people who make their livings from their expertise with the Oracle database engine and their skill at handling performance issues. But they do have one special trait in common. They strive to adopt a scientific approach to their work - so they don't make claims about Oracle's performance unless they can construct a reproducible test case; they don't believe any claims about Oracle's performance unless the claim is backed by a well-argued proof.

**Oracle is a complex, subtle, and continually evolving environment. The members of the Oak Table Network aim to keep pace with it, continually enhancing their tests and understanding so that the information they disseminate is always justified, correct, and up to date.

Since the initial seminar meetings, various other individuals who have demonstrated a similar capacity for designing, executing and publishing investigative tests into the behaviour of Oracle have been invited to become associates of the network.
These include Peter Sharman, Kyle Hailey, Tim Gorman and others (the complete list of members is available on the website).

Membership is by invitation, but it is almost mandatory to have survived at least one all-night post-conference technical session with a subset of the network; ideally of an oak table in the dining room of a farmhouse in Maalov, Denmark.


The OakTable Network. A group of elite drinkers with a little Oracle problem.