Wow, it has been a while!

So, I have been doing a lot of long hours, lot of hard work and not enough sleeping. Not good for me.

I am very needed in my position due to my Oracle skills.... kind of an Oracle developer crossed with a dba. I have never wanted to be a dba because of the repetitive stuff you have to do. So, I never took those classes even when I got them for free as an Oracle employee at HQ. I am much better at doing the design and such of development work. I know how to write Java having spent years doing it at Oracle HQ working on Oracle Applications, but I got a bit burned out with java. I think it has to do with all the little things you had to do for the "business" people getting picky about what color this needs to be and where they want it to sit on the screen, asking it to move 1 pixel this way or that way.

I am now back to a company that spreads it between Open Source stuff (my preference) and Microsoft stuff. The MS stuff has it's place, but it pretty pricey when you come down to it. I know, you want to say that Oracle is way more expensive, but I beg to differ. Say for a standard development environment with a dev-test/qa-production environment hierarchy. In the dev enviroment for MS you have to pay for the OS, the Database and the Visual Source Safe IDE. In Oracle/Opensource, you have to get an OS (linux) -- FREE, IDE -- FREE and the Oracle DB -- FREE (in development). In test/QA, same situation, pay for all MS stuff and all Oracle/OpenSource is FREE. In production, same for MS and you may even need to set up load balancing with 2 or more databases and 2 or more webservers in essence doubling the cost. On the Oracle/OpenSource side, everything would be free except for the Oracle database which is expensive, but probably not as expensive as the whole cost of all the MS software all the way up the hierarchy. Also, in many cases where you need multiple databases in MS, you can probably use a single Oracle db. Given, that some of that is the OS since linux has a MUCH smaller memory footprint than windows, but still.

I did say Oracle in my title, so I had to at least throw some of that in rather than just my multiple sclerosis. Football season is not going on and there is not much Chiefs news, so geek stuff it is.

Jamie