New Years Resolutions

Many people do not like making New Years resolutions. I, however, can rarely resist the opportunity to try to better myself - even if the opportunity is really only motivational. This year I have 3 "professional" resolutions and at the behest of Chet Justice, I've decided to share them...

1. Oracle Database 11g Administrator Certified Associate - I've been PL/SQL certified for a while and always wanted to learn more on the DBA side of Oracle. Certification is a great way to get exposed to a lot of options and features but it takes hard work and experience to get good with them. I'm really hoping that Oracle will offer an ApEx certification eventually. Until then DBA OCA, here I come.
2. A  New Open Source Project (plRecur) - My first open source project, tapiGen, was a bit of a failure. Not that it was particularly bad code or didn't do what it was supposed to... I believe it failed because it required such a big change in the way one codes it was perhaps a little impractical. I've learned a bit from that and have something else in mind this time around. Actually, I've already begun coding ;) plRecur will be a PL/SQL package based API for working with things that recur. Typically this is an event of some kind.
   
   Of course working with recurrence is nothing new. My early attempts with this functionality are embarrassing to look back on. They where highly proprietary and not very flexible. The idea with plRecur is two fold: First to create a PL/SQL package based backend that makes working with recurrence easy and second to create a basic ApEx page region based frontend that can be used to interact with the backend.
   
   The calendaring syntax will be based on DBMS_SCHEDULER's calendaring syntax so experience with that will help. More details on this project will follow soon but here's a brief teaser... The calendar feeds off a call to pl_recur.dates_pipe which is a pipelined function.
3. Become More Fluent In Spanish - This obviously has nothing to do with Oracle or ApEx, but it's something I need to keep working on!