TEAM Zarate Tarrani Notes From the Field

Deja Vu - I was asked some Oracle questions, which triggered memories of past projects, which set me to poking into corners of the net for information.

First stop was the Underground Oracle FAQ, which is comprehensive. I wandered off course a bit and found Balanced Scorecard software free for downloading, then proceeded on my quest. Speaking of Quest, I was unable to find a non-crippled verion of TOAD - a wonderful tool from days gone by, but did find Benthic Software from which I purchased Golden and GoldView in 1999 when I was doing a lot of Oracle work

Overwhelmed by nostalgia I decided to look up an old friend, OraXcel, only to find that it has been renamed to SQL*XL Lite ... but, unlike TOAD, it's still free and available. To be fair to Quest Software they do make available an impressive list of useful whitepapers that offset my disappointment over TOAD's plight.

I hit a few more places as my journey wound down, including Oriole's outstanding free script and tools collection (the spirit of sharing lives here - and shows that warty amphibians may sell out, but birds soar). I checked out Peter and Mag's collection of Oracle-related links, paid my respects to TUSC, and ended my trek and the evening at The Data Administration Newsletter (TDAN for short), which I read every month. The latest issue celebrates TDAN's fourth year, and contains two outstanding articles: Architecting for CRM and A Repository Model - Business Rules (Structural Assertions & Derivations) ... among others that I haven't yet read.

On that note, it's goodnight from Tustin, CA.