33,000 and Counting
People have questions, and Tom Kyte has answers.
Tom Kyte, architect in server tech- nologies at Oracle, is the man with the
answers in his Ask Tom column in Oracle
Magazine and at the Ask Tom Website
( asktom.oracle.com). Oracle Magazine
Editor in Chief Tom Haunert recently sat
down with Kyte to ask him still more questions. The following is an excerpt from that
interview. Download the full podcast at
oracle.com/magcasts.
Oracle Magazine: When did you start
answering questions, and how many questions have you answered so far?
Kyte: Well, it actually started in about
October of 1994. That was the first time I
posted to the internet Usenet news groups,
which is the discussion forum precursor to
Facebook and Twitter and everything else
like that. I spent most of my time in
comp.databases.oracle.server answering
questions about Oracle Database.
From ’94 to about 2000, I posted about
12,000 times to those forums. And then
starting in January/February of 2000, I
started doing the Ask Tom column in Oracle
Magazine, and the Ask Tom Website started
in April of that year. So it’s been about a
dozen years of Ask Tom and going on 17 or
18 years of participating in the community
answering questions online.
Oracle Magazine: What has motivated you to
answer all of these questions?
Kyte: I like the education aspect of it: being
able to convey to someone the right way to
do something and the best way to do a particular thing inside the Oracle Database software. And I like seeing the lightbulb come on
in someone.
DAVID DEAL
Over time I’ve enjoyed watching people
“graduate.” Many of the people who used
to ask me questions are now the speakers
at Oracle Open World, IOUG [Independent
Oracle Users Group] conferences, user
groups, technical symposiums, and so
on. I enjoy watching the people come up
Oracle Server Technologies Architect Tom Kyte
If people are
interested in
these Real World
Performance Tour
sessions, we’ll
be doing more
in 2012.
through the ranks, and I’ve seen many
more than one go from asking the ques-
tions to answering the questions to deliv-
ering the technical material. That’s a
pretty cool thing.
Oracle Magazine: You’ve been quoted as
saying that using Oracle Exadata involves
some level of unlearning certain Oracle
Database practices. What does that mean?
Kyte: The vast majority of us, close to 100
percent of us, learned everything we know
about databases and tuning in a transac-
tional environment that I’ll call a small rows
environment. In that environment, you’re
running queries that might hit tens or hun-
dreds of rows. Your processes affect a small
number of rows at a time, so doing things
row by row works very well.
