asktom

The AskTOM data model

Connor McDonald ,

I popped out a tweet yesterday in Throwback Thursday style showing the date of the first question we took AskTOM – 18 years ago! Many entire computer systems don’t even last that long, and AskTOM hasn’t really needed to change that much in those 18 years. We’ve added a new skin, added the ability to have multiple AskTOM experts on the answer team, and of course, our new-for-2018 Office Hours program, which gives everyone free access to experts inside Oracle Corporation.

John replied to my tweet asking if we could show the ERD.

image

So here it is – I’ve taken out a few things here and there that don’t have any impact on the public facing part of AskTOM. And I’ve included some notes underneath about each table’s purpose in AskTOM.

Relational_1

ATE_ADMINS

The administrators on AskTOM. There are various privilege levels such as being able to see the admin pages, view unanswered questions and actually answer them.

ATE_HOME_MESSAGES

Any messages that we want to appear on the Questions home screen, such as upcoming conferences etc.

ATE_SUPPORTING_FILES

Files that support the answering of questions. We’ll sometimes link in scripts, images etc to better answer a question. They are all stored in here, in the database of course.

ATE_PRESENTATIONS

The presentations and other resources that you can download from the Resources page.

image

ATE_FEEDBACK

Our recently added facility to allow people to give us feedback on the AskTOM application.

image

ATE_SUBMITTED_QUESTIONS

The bread and butter of AskTOM. Your questions are stored here, along with our answer.

ATE_POSTING_STATUS

image

When you submit a question, we record it as “New, Never Read”. Once we start working on it, we will then mark it as “Read, Not Answered” so that another AskTOM administrator does not work on it. We might then have a little back-and-forth with our original submitter if we need more detail (which is a polite way of saying they didn’t read the Question Guidelines, and hence we didn’t get a test case or sample data or nicely formatted code etc etc) Smile. So that is “Need More Info” and “More Info Supplied” statuses.

Once we’ve answered the question, if we think the general community will benefit it will be “Answered Publish” which puts it up on the home page, otherwise its “Answered, Not Published”, which means the original submitter will see it, but no-one else. As you can see from the numbers in the picture (taken today), for the 18,500 questions you can see on AskTOM, there’s another 5,500 we’ve answered that don’t make the front page.

“No Further Action” is what happens when we ask for more information and the submitter decides to ghost us, or if a submitter decides the best way to communicate with us is via a torrent of insults. Either way, we ain’t bothering with that question again Smile

ATE_QUESTION_REVIEWS

The review comments from the community, and our follow-ups for each question that we answer.

image

ATE_REVIEW_STATUSES

We read every single review that comes into AskTOM. They come in with a status of “New”, we’ll “Assign” them to an administrator, and once we’re done with it, we mark it “Complete”. Yup, that’s over 125,000 reviews we’ve taken.

image

ATE_QUESTION_STATUS_HIST

We track our own performance on AskTOM so that we can better serve you all. So every time we change a question status, eg from “New” to “Need More Info” to “Answered” etc, we log the time at which the status change occurred so we can review it later to see how we’re tracking.

ATE_OBSOLETE_QUESTIONS

18 years of taking and answering questions means that some of the answers may no longer be correct or up to date. If a reviewer brings this to our attention, we’ll record it here as an action for an administrator to look at and rectify. If you’re wondering why it is not just a flag on the question, that’s because a single question may become obsolete more than once in as time marches on.

image

ATE_QUESTION_VIEWS

Every time you click on a question in AskTOM, we record that fact. Why? Because that drives the metrics on knowing which questions are most sought after by the community. We get hundreds of thousands of question views every week in AskTOM.

ATE_QUESTIONS_TOP20

This drives our “Popular Questions” page on AskTOM.

image

ATE_QUESTIONS_SOCIAL_MEDIA

Whenever we tweet out about a particular AskTOM question, or pop it on Facebook, we log it here – because we don’t want to be spamming you. Smile

And that’s all there is to it. All driven by SQL, PL/SQL and of course the latest and greatest version of Application Express.

Subtle changes in XML, 11g vs 12c

Connor McDonald ,

An AskTOM reader brought this to our attention.  It is unlikely to cause you any issues, but perhaps is good to know when it comes times to upgrade from 11g to 12c.

If you are taking an user defined object type and transposing that to XML, you will see a slightly different handling of NULLs in the object attributes.  Here’s a quick example which demonstrates the difference.

11g

Nulls attributes do not appear within the XML output



SQL> create or replace type test_dummy_object as object (
  2    id number,
  3    "name"  varchar2(30),
  4    "Value" varchar2(30)
  5  )
  6  /

Type created.

SQL>
SQL> select xmlserialize(content xmltype(anydata.convertObject( test_dummy_object(1, null, '0') )) indent SHOW DEFAULTS) from dual
  2  union all
  3  select xmlserialize(content xmltype(anydata.convertObject( test_dummy_object(1, null, '0') )) indent HIDE DEFAULTS) from dual
  4  union all
  5  select xmltype(anydata.convertObject( test_dummy_object(1, null, '0') )).getclobval() from dual
  6  union all
  7  select xmltype(test_dummy_object(1, null, '0')).getclobval() from dual
  8  union all
  9  select xmltype.createxml(test_dummy_object(1, null, '0')).getclobval() from dual;

XMLSERIALIZE(CONTENTXMLTYPE(ANYDATA.CONVERTOBJECT(TEST_DUMMY_OBJECT(1,NULL,'0'))
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  1
  0



  1
  0


10
10
10

12c

Nulls attributes do appear within the XML output



SQL> create or replace type test_dummy_object as object (
  2    id number,
  3    "name"  varchar2(30),
  4    "Value" varchar2(30)
  5  )
  6  /

Type created.

SQL>
SQL> select xmlserialize(content xmltype(anydata.convertObject( test_dummy_object(1, null, '0') )) indent SHOW DEFAULTS) from dual
  2  union all
  3  select xmlserialize(content xmltype(anydata.convertObject( test_dummy_object(1, null, '0') )) indent HIDE DEFAULTS) from dual
  4  union all
  5  select xmltype(anydata.convertObject( test_dummy_object(1, null, '0') )).getclobval() from dual
  6  union all
  7  select xmltype(test_dummy_object(1, null, '0')).getclobval() from dual
  8  union all
  9  select xmltype.createxml(test_dummy_object(1, null, '0')).getclobval() from dual;

XMLSERIALIZE(CONTENTXMLTYPE(ANYDATA.CONVERTOBJECT(TEST_DUMMY_OBJECT(1,NULL,'0')))INDENTSHOWDEFAULTS)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  1
  
  0



  1
  
  0


1
0

1
0

1
0

UKOUG is coming

Connor McDonald ,

Yes it is just a few more weeks until the UKOUG conference swings by.

This has been one of my favourite conferences for years – dating back to my first one in 2002 !!.  You can see from the picture at the tail of this post – whilst times have changed in those 15 years, the basic tenets of community, networking and technical content remain unchanged to this day.

The AskTOM team will all be there and there’s a fantastic agenda spread over 4 days.  This user group really knows how to “bake” a good conference.  Maybe they followed my recipe. Smile

 

 

OakTable area, UKOUG 2002

image

Why being wrong can be awesome

Connor McDonald , ,

OK, Now that I’ve started the post with a nice click-bait heading, let’s get down to the business of being wrong. Smile

I did a lot of conference presentations last year, and the great thing about that for me was that I got to meet a lot of new people in the Oracle community in the Developer and DBA space. One of the questions that came up over and over again was about putting one’s knowledge “out there” in the community and how to deal with the repercussions of that.  In particular, “What if you publish something that is proven wrong?”

Here’s the thing about being wrong …. there’s two likely outcomes:

  • Someone tells you that you are wrong, or
  • You never know that you’re wrong and you wallow about in flawed darkness for all eternity.

Which would you prefer ? Smile

This is really all about perception from both the blogger and the reader, and the way they behave.

If you are the reader and you find something that is incorrect, you have choices:

  • Absolutely go ballistic on the author via comments, insult their intelligence, tell them how much smarter than them you are, and that they should never have been born, or
  • Initiate a reasoned discussion about where the errors might be, how the author may have come to that point, discuss boundary conditions and both leave the discussion more knowledgeable as a result.

Rest assured, if you take the former position, no amount of smarts is going outweigh the public reputation you’ve just acquired as being a schmuck.

And similarly, as an author of content, when someone points out an error you can:

  • take it in good faith, and work toward improving your knowledge by investigating further and collaborating with the person who discovered it, or
  • just deny it, and lose your mind at them and denigrate them so that you don’t lose your fine public standing.

If you do the latter….guess what you just lost?  Yup, your fine public standing.

And here’s the thing. Even if the person pointing out the error is indeed lacking the basic skills of civility, and is demonstrating their “schmucky-ness” all over your blog, just put that aside and focus on improving the content.  Other readers will pick up on this, and they’ll value your contribution to the community much more than Joe Schmuck.  They’ll be “red flagged” in the minds of the community as “one of those members that just isn’t worth the time of day”.

And if you’re wondering what the motivation for this post is – just this morning on an AskTOM answer, one of the Product Managers inside Oracle reached out to me and said “Hey Connor – I don’t think that answer is completely correct” and gave some me some additional content about the cause, and how to improve the answer.  The net result of that:

  • I learn some new stuff!
  • The community gets better content from AskTOM!
  • I make a new contact within the Oracle organization!

So don’t ever let being wrong stop you from contributing to the community.  It’s the best way of improving yourself and the community as well.