forum
May 29th, 2006 by Peter Scott
Mark Rittman has been hosting a BI & DW forum since the beginning of the year. But from a recent post from Mark there is a strong possibility that forum will fold; not because there is a lack of posts but because it is starting to look a bit like AskMark and Mr Rittman is not blest with unlimited time (he has a young family and a fulltime job) to provide what is essentially a free service to the community. I, and a few others, have chipped in on the few occasions when the question posted fits with our strengths but for a disproportionate amount of the time Mark fields the queries.
Other fora are out there; for example the Dizwell forum gets a large number of posts and more importantly a large number of people willing to post an initial answer to question. Howard Rogers is not always the first responder to posts on his forum. So why doesn’t it work that way on Mark’s forum?
What is it about the BI community that they are not so interested in sharing compared with the straight DBA community that seems much more able to share? Question to self is “straight DBA” an acceptable term?
May 29th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
and in the Oracle apps communities i see even less that sharing and contribution attitude. I guess has to do with the total number of people involved, and ‘stability’ (and age) of the domain.
May 29th, 2006 at 8:15 pm
Hi Pete
A couple of observations.
Firstly, I think Howard’s forum has prospered as he’s put a lot of effort into building a community around his site, something that I’ve not had enough spare time to do. Forums like his don’t just happen by accident, they need nurturing and I’ve just not had the time, unfortunately.
Also, however – and you’d have seen this at the UKOUG BI event the other week – the BI community don’t seem to be up for debate or discussion us much as say, server tech, hence you don’t seem to get the sort of to-and-fro debate that you seem to get on DBMS sites. And, as you say, there isn’t such a philosophy around ‘sharing’ information, whether it’s down to lack of confidence, or something else, I’m not sure. What it does mean though is that there’s a lot of unanswered questions on the forum, which bugs me as I feel I should answer them, but what with family and so on, again I just don’t have the time.
cheers
Mark
May 29th, 2006 at 8:38 pm
Hi Mark
As soon as I posted on my blog I thought, “perhaps I should have dropped Mark a note first” But it does erk me that you go the extra mile and try to start up something and others just don’t take up the challenge. So I hoped that you would find what I put a fair reflection of where things are at.
I suppose there is another reason why people don’t contribute – perhaps there is a fear of stepping into your territory, or perhaps that of SolstonePlus – after all most people don’t work for you!
But that said, you are right, a good argument is something missing from the BI community – it could be related to keeping ‘trade secrets’ or a corporate desire to avoid contention – that could well apply to me as for example my blogging is tolerated by my employers providing I do not generate disrepute.
May 29th, 2006 at 9:47 pm
Pete / Mark,
The first point is that, despite the fact that I’m sure Mark advertised the existence of the forum, it didn’t really stick in my mind (not much does these days) so I’ve just had my first quick visit.
The first thing I noticed when I visited was that there was a question or two that I might be able to offer a response to.
The second, looking at the questions, is that DW questions tend to be *very* specific and often about a specific reporting tool. If I haven’t used Discoverer lately, I can’t help there, if someone is interested in Siebel Analytics etc. etc. There are so many diverse products that core questions are fewer. The very fact that Oracle’s BI strategy is a constant topic of debate is indicative of the fragmentation in this domain.
If you look at the Dizwell forum, the questions with most responses are probably about core server functionality because more people have understanding of that. i.e. Although the Oracle server might be a complex product, it’s one product. The fragmentation in the BI world makes each site quite individual and the number of possible responders fewer.
For what it’s worth, I’d be tempted to give it one last throw of the dice, with a blog to draw a bit more attention to it.
[joke]… and if all you DW types would stop your funny hand-shakes and strange database designs, you might get some ‘straight’ database people involved[/joke]
June 1st, 2006 at 9:16 am
A small update on this. I tried to register for the forum to answer one of the questions but found that Mark didn’t verify my account. I emailed him and it turns out he’s not been getting the account verification emails.
Perhaps that’s why there aren’t more contributors ;-)
June 2nd, 2006 at 1:04 pm
Well, I left Mark a message a while ago that there was some problem with his blogs and fora that prevented folsk from loging in. Could be something related to Firefox as the browser?