The Feature

10 Questions for Mark Rittman

April 1, 2006 on 3:11 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Conversations | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

I am very excited to publish an interview with an Oracle blogging pioneer and enthusiast Mark Rittman. Mark’s weblog has been around for a LONG time as he had seen the benefits of this media for professional purposes way before the rest of us did. To me, Mark’s blog is an ultimate bizlog. A very nice job, Mark! One can tell you do presentations for living.

How did come to learn Oracle?

I first came across the Oracle database when I worked in product marketing at the Woolwich Building Society, a mortgage lender in the UK. We used Oracle for our first “customer profitability” data warehouse and I joined the project as a business analyst, using Oracle Discoverer/2000 and Designer/2000. Over the years I moved more into data warehouse design and ran my first data warehousing project whilst working for Toyota in London. After working at Toyota, I moved into the world of consultancy, starting at SolStonePlus in Brighton where I headed up their new Oracle data warehousing practice. Over the following years, I’ve worked with tools such as Oracle Warehouse Builder, Oracle Express Server and Oracle OLAP, Oracle Discoverer, Reports and Portal as well as the various releases of the database and application server.

How are you involved currently?

I lead a team of consultants who work with the various Oracle BI and data warehousing tools. Generally I’d work out the architecture for a project, perhaps get involved in the presales effort, do various short engagements performing tuning around the tools, application server and database, as well as doing the odd two or three month engagement where I’d be either the lead developer or perhaps the development DBA.

What inspired you to start blogging?

Back in 2002 I used to read blogs by the likes of Raymond Chen, Robert Scoble, Joel Spolsky and Joshua Allen and whilst they were good, I thought it’d be interesting to read something about Oracle as opposed to Microsoft. I’d had a homepage for several years prior to this, where I’d posted presentations, articles I’d written and bits of code, but I started the blog proper back in June 2003 and I’ve kept it going since then. For the first 18 months or so I was pretty much the sole Oracle blogger, then people like Niall Litchfield, Tom Kyte, Howard Rogers and others came along, and now there must be 50 or so Oracle bloggers out there writing about their experiences.

Are there any special topics or issues that you enjoy covering?

When I first started out, I posted about everything and anything that came up in the Oracle world – the latest article by Jonathan Lewis, an interesting article on AskTom, bits of news about Oracle Corporation and any new products that came out. Over the years I’ve changed the focus somewhat as people like Tom and the various Oracle product managers all have their own blogs now, and I write more in-depth articles on new products I’ve worked with, projects I’ve been involved in and opinions I’ve got on the industry. I guess my postings are split 50/50 between what you’d call traditional server tech postings – which is what I get up to in my spare time – and ones about business intelligence, which reflects the work I do day to day with clients.

What have you done to personalize your blog?

Apart from when I first started with Radio Userland’s blogging software, I’ve always built my own template rather than use the default ones that come with the blogging software. I also host the software and site myself so I’ve got a bit more flexibility when it comes to upgrading, site layout and so on. The site has been through various redesigns over the years, and most recently I’ve expanded it to contain links to other articles that I’ve found useful, a forum for posing technical questions, and some commentary and write-up on the various Oracle business intelligence products.

Do you have any favorite posts?

Probably the ones that have generated the most comments and feedbacks, such as The Cost Of Database Independence where I talked about a project where the customer refused to implement any Oracle-specific functionality; Is Oracle A Legacy Technology? where I looked at a recent article in Oracle Scene by Mogens Norgaard, Tracing Parallel Execution which actually got cited by Doug Burns as good bit of work around Parallel Query, and Being Too Clever For Your Own Good where I owned up to perhaps over-complicating a bit of database tuning I was asked to do.

What are some of your favorite blogs (Oracle or otherwise)?

Well the Oracle ones that I generally check on a daily basis are those by Tom Kyte, Howard Rogers, Tim Hall, Peter Scott, Doug Burns, Andrew Clarke and Abhinav Agarwal. Outside of Oracle, I check out Eric Sink, Adam Barr, Paul Thurrott, Andy Hayler and Raymond Chen more or less every day,

What tools do you find most helpful in putting together your blog?

Just textpad, Paint Shop Pro and Frontpage. All the templating and so on is done by the Moveable Type blogging software.

How does blogging fit into your job or your business?

I’m pretty lucky actually in that my employers are pretty supportive of my blogging. They “sponsor” the site, in that they cover my hosting fees, but they don’t have any say in the content I post, it’s not edited by them or in any way approved. I can put a blog posting together in work if I get a spare moment, but the vast majority of the work I do on it is in the evenings or when I’m traveling somewhere.

What do you think business blogging will look like 3 years from now?

No idea. I suspect it won’t be around in exactly the same way, because nothing stays the same on the internet and interests and focuses change. I don’t even know if I’ll be blogging in three years time, it’s certainly quite demanding of my time and my family (my wife and two young children) obviously come first. I’m trying to encourage a few of my colleagues at work to start a blog (and of course Lisa Dobson‘s joining us in a couple of weeks) so maybe I’ll be able to hand things over to someone else in time.

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