About

I suppose that if you’ve stumbled across this blog, you may have a couple of questions such as – who is this bloke ? and why the Anti-Kyte ?

I’m Mike Smithers. I’m not anyone you’d have heard of (even my Mum has trouble remembering my name). I’ve no scintillating conference presentations behind me. I’ve not published or contributed to any seminal works on “The Hidden Truth Behind Oracle Forms Error Messages” or suchlike.

What I do have is experience of working as an Oracle Developer and DBA since 1993. This experience has mainly revolved around fixing stuff that was broke when I got there rather than designing shiny new applications ( though I’ve done one or two) whilst following all of the given Best Practices – whatever they were at the time.

Like many people working with Oracle, I’ve frequently been grateful to find helpful information on the finer points of Oracle and PL/SQL from luminaries such as Kyte and Feuerstein. I’ve also frequently been frustrated when these experts are invoked to justify some design decision or coding standard that is completely inappropriate for the situation I find myself in ( i.e. trying to fix or enhance a running production system that’s been designed in such a way as to make what’s being proposed impractical).

These guys are experts in Oracle. But, as with anything, there are myriad ways to write bad code in PL/SQL and fixing this isn’t straight forward.

I make no claim to have anything like the in-depth knowledge they have of this subject.

So, this is more of an explanation of how and when to apply their pearls of wisdom to the mess you ‘re currently confronted with rather than the ideal situation which these ideas are often, necessarily, predicated on.

Both Kyte and Feuerstein do often make the point that you should never take the pontifications of an expert as gospel and should always test them out and adapt them to the circumstances in which you find yourself. Often however, this message gets forgotten in the headlong rush to “just get it done”.

As to the second of your questions, it would probably be more accurate to call this blog “The sub-Kyte”….but then this would rob me of the pleasure of standing in front of a mirror pretending to be Johnny Rotten and miming to Anarchy in the UK. “I am a sub-Kyte” just doesn’t scan.