From hope and euphoria, to desperation, firings and the ultimate demise of a company. Tim Gorman charts the rise and fall of a

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2024-05-09 03:00:05

From hope and euphoria, to desperation, firings and the ultimate demise of a company. Tim Gorman charts the rise and fall of a "visionary" IT project.

—-Editor’s Note—- I was Tim’s editor at Apress when he wrote this piece for the book, Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table. I’d like to thank Gary Cornell and Jonathan Gennick at Apress, as well as Tim himself, for allowing me to reproduce it (in slightly edited down form) on Simple-Talk.

The book was meant to be something “completely different”. Rather than the usual, “here is feature x, here is an example of how to use it“, it was an attempt to teach people some truths about database development through the real experiences and stories of a bunch of guys (“the OakTable network”), who had spent much of their life doing this stuff.

I think it was largely successful, and in terms of the sort of thing we were gunning for, Tim’s contribution hit the nail pretty squarely on the head. It may seem odd to be presenting an “Oracle” article on a “SQL Server” site, but you don’t need to know Oracle to get something out of the book or Tim’s piece, and the lessons it teaches are applicable to anyone who develops database-driven software. Like all good stories it has an intriguing opening, a strong narrative and a killer ending. It remains not only my favorite chapter in the book, but one of my favorite chapters of all the books I edited.