Developing Successful Oracle Applications

I spend the bulk of my time working with Oracle database software and, more to the point, with people who use this software. Over the last eighteen years, I’ve worked on many projects—successful ones as well as complete failures—and if I were to encapsulate my experiences into a few broad statements, here’s what they would be:

An application built around the database—dependent on the database—will succeed or fail based on how it uses the database. As a corollary to this—all applications are built around databases; I can’t think of a single useful application that doesn’t store data persistently somewhere.

Applications come, applications go. The

data

, however, lives forever. It is not about building applications; it really is about the data underneath these applications.

A development team needs at its heart a core of database-savvy coders who are responsible for ensuring the database logic is sound and the system is built to perform from day one. Tuning after the fact—tuning after deployment—means you did not build it that way.