Review of Oracle Magazine- January/February 1997

The January/February 1997 edition of Oracle Magazine was the “10th Anniversary Special Edition”. They were celebrating a little bit early as it should be the June/July edition, as the first Oracle Magazine was published in June 1987.  This edition says that Oracle Magazine started in 1986. So there is a little bit of confusion on when Oracle Magazine started. Some people say Oracle Magazine started before the first edition, as there was a regular-ish newsletter for a couple of years before the June 1987 edition.

The January/February 1997 edition had its contents divided into two main sections. The first of these sections was on the typical articles you would find in Oracle Magazine and the other section was for a collection of articles for the 10th anniversary.

The articles for the main part of January/February 1997 edition of Oracle Magazine included:

• Oracle Spatial Data option was released providing a full-function geometry server.
• Developer/2000 for the Web gets released
• Discoverer 3.0 beta is released
• Objects in High Gear looks at object technology and how it is and can be used in our data and applications, with example applications for education and health.

The 10th Anniversary section articles included:

• Oracle Magazine editor, Leslie Steere, had an article called The Cure for Information Overload. In this article she listed 10 questions that can help you determine if you are from Information Overload Syndrome.
1. Has your job become unsatisfying?
2. Do you find yourself unable to make important decisions?
3. Have you lost the ability to prioritize?
4. Has your work performance been less than stellar lately?
5. Have you caught yourself snapping at coworkers?
6. Do you feel unreasonably anxious at business meetings?
7. Have your sleep patterns changed for the worse?
8. Are you drinking and eating more compulsively than usual?
9. Are you experiencing problems in your important personal relationships?
10. Are you physically ill more often than usual?
• Follow the Leaders article had short interviews with some of Oracle’s top executives on the past and future of Oracle. The executive included, Dirk Kabcenell, EVP Product Division Administration, Phil Wilson, SVP Human Resources, Ian Thacker, SVP Oracle UK, Thomas Theodores, VP Corporate Legal, randy Baker, SVP, Worldwide Customer Support and Nimish Mehta, SVP Industry Management.
• Ken Jacob, VP of Product Strategy talks about about his time at Oracle and his vision for the next 10 years. “What are we going to do over the next few years in online transaction processing? How are we going to incorporate object-based technologies, asynchronous messaging, and multitier architectures. What are we going to do to enhance the data-warehouse features? There’ll be some internal architecture restructuring of the system, but the basic foundation is strong. There is nothing that we need to catch up on, so our task is to just keep moving ahead into the future.”
• Sohaib Abbasi, SVP of Oracle Tools Division, who has been working in Oracle since 1982 and lead up the SQL*Forms development in 1984. He talks about the Oracle Development Tool.
• An early customer for Oracle was the particle research centre CERN. This article charts how CERN has used Oracle from version 2 to Oracle 8.
• Kevin Loney gives 10 scripts that every DBA needs for managing the database.

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the image at the top of this post or click here.

In my next blog post I will look at the 20th and 25th Anniversary editions of Oracle Magazine.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions and a PDF for the very first Oracle Magazine from June 1987.