00:00:00: Hello and welcome to another episode of Devs on Tape.

00:00:04: Again this episode is in English because our guest is mainly speaking English and it would

00:00:09: be not so great to ask him to learn German just for our podcast.

00:00:13: Have fun with it.

00:00:29: Yes, again.

00:00:30: Hello.

00:00:31: So first, ladies first.

00:00:32: Hello, Carol.

00:00:33: Hi, Kai.

00:00:34: And hello to our guest, Andrew Mendelsohn.

00:00:37: Hi.

00:00:37: So for our listeners, maybe you are not that familiar

00:00:42: because you're not that in social media, as we noticed.

00:00:46: So maybe you can introduce yourself to our listeners.

00:00:49: Sure.

00:00:50: So I work at Oracle.

00:00:52: And I've been at Oracle for quite a long time.

00:00:55: I started as a developer, believe it or not, in 1984.

00:00:59: working on Oracle Database version six, version five even.

00:01:03: And over the years I've moved into management.

00:01:07: I run most of database development.

00:01:09: I share that responsibility with Juan Loaiza,

00:01:12: who I don't know if you've had on your podcast yet.

00:01:15: - Not yet.

00:01:16: - But my team does a lot of the core database

00:01:20: software development, and we also are responsible

00:01:24: for the autonomous database service.

00:01:26: And I also have a team that does customer support

00:01:30: for customers using the Oracle database on Exadatas

00:01:33: on-premises and also for the customers using our cloud

00:01:36: services.

00:01:38: Great.

00:01:39: So I think this is the right person,

00:01:42: Carvel, to talk about Autonomous Database.

00:01:44: Do you think so?

00:01:45: Yeah, definitely.

00:01:48: Yeah, I'm a really big fan, actually,

00:01:51: because I love the Always Free tier of the Oracle Cloud.

00:01:55: I'm using it by myself for some private projects and yeah, doing stuff with Oracle Apex.

00:02:03: And I wanted to ask if there are any plans to extend or add services for this free tier

00:02:10: plan, for example?

00:02:12: Well, today we have, I think, autonomous database for free on the free tier.

00:02:20: I don't know that we're going to extend anything in the near term, but we think we have enough

00:02:30: resources for free for you to build pretty much any application you want using the Oracle

00:02:35: Database or Apex, if you want to do that.

00:02:41: We see the free tier as a way of getting developers to try our stuff.

00:02:47: new releases of the database software on-prem, a lot of customers now are just playing with

00:02:52: it on the cloud because that's the easiest way to get an Oracle database provisioned

00:02:58: and to play with.

00:02:59: So we're very enthusiastic about cloud.

00:03:03: And I know there's some customers who are still not ready for cloud, but I'm seeing

00:03:08: more and more that customers have decided, "This is the future.

00:03:13: we're going to start doing new things, new systems,

00:03:16: new applications on the cloud.

00:03:18: So we're very excited to hear you're

00:03:20: using our free tier for doing some APEX application

00:03:24: development.

00:03:24: And we're really pushing APEX certainly very heavily

00:03:28: right now.

00:03:29: Yeah, that's basically also the next topic on our list, right?

00:03:33: So I mean, just to add my two cents,

00:03:37: I started the ATP or the Autonomous Database

00:03:39: in the free tier to just run a database,

00:03:43: put some compute engine in front of it,

00:03:45: and it was all free.

00:03:46: And I was very excited to do so

00:03:48: because back then I just rented my own server

00:03:51: and did all the stack, all the stuff, everything by myself,

00:03:54: sometimes using a Docker container

00:03:56: to install Oracle database.

00:03:58: And now you can use everything for free.

00:04:02: There might be some more promotion

00:04:04: that everyone is getting it really, really for free.

00:04:06: So you just make a guide, like everyone on the world

00:04:09: can use it completely for free.

00:04:11: And there are just three or four steps to get a database.

00:04:14: It is not the whole process, right?

00:04:17: That might be something we can give as a feedback.

00:04:20: - The whole simplicity of getting access

00:04:24: to very complex technology on the cloud

00:04:27: is just unbelievable.

00:04:28: And I don't think people quite appreciate the difference

00:04:31: between the classical on-premise world

00:04:35: where you have to make provisions on hardware and get it up and running and,

00:04:39: you know, get the software installed and deal with patching and upgrades.

00:04:43: And then on the cloud, like there's nothing, you don't have to do anything.

00:04:46: You just build your application. It's, uh, it's incredibly simple.

00:04:50: I mean, the, the main point is to, to get them this easy to the free tier.

00:04:55: But, um, if we focus on developers, right. So, I mean, it's,

00:05:00: it's very obvious that developers are the people in the company who are

00:05:04: influencing, I call it influencing because we are in this tech social stuff,

00:05:08: influencing their bosses and CEOs of the company that this might be the right

00:05:13: tech to get a problem on issue solved.

00:05:18: Right? So the question would be,

00:05:21: what does Oracle do to enhance this relation to the

00:05:26: developers? So how do they reach out morally to the developers?

00:05:31: So they decide again, back again, I call it like that,

00:05:34: to I want to use an Oracle database.

00:05:36: We should go all in for Oracle and I will use Apex.

00:05:40: Yeah, that's a really good question.

00:05:43: As we move to this world where people are using clouds,

00:05:50: the main users of our technology are no longer DBAs.

00:05:53: The DBAs are sort of--

00:05:55: they work for Oracle now.

00:05:56: We run the databases for them.

00:05:58: And so customers are really, as you said, heavily influenced by what the developers want.

00:06:04: And so we are, you know, in database development, we are making a very conscious push to try to

00:06:11: communicate more with developers. If you look at what we present, you know, the messages we're

00:06:17: presenting, they're very targeted now at developers. We are talking about what we call converged

00:06:23: database and converge database is a developer message.

00:06:27: And we're basically telling developers is, you know, if you want to build any kind

00:06:31: of data management application, you want a database that is very flexible.

00:06:36: You know, it's like a Swiss army knife, you know, it can do everything.

00:06:38: And Oracle database is sort of like that.

00:06:41: And I, you know, and developers, you would think should be very much into

00:06:47: like, how can I do things fast?

00:06:49: Yeah.

00:06:50: You know, and I want to use whatever technology is going to let me solve my business problem

00:06:54: as fast as possible.

00:06:56: And so combination of like autonomous database and the converged database technologies, and

00:07:02: then something like Apex, it's just unbelievable.

00:07:06: And it's like, you're right though, that we have not completely, you know, really succeeded

00:07:12: in getting developers to understand this.

00:07:16: I mean, it's actually one of the things we would like to hear from people like you is like,

00:07:20: OK, it's great that you're using Oracle database and Apex and all that.

00:07:24: But, you know, what what are what do we need to do more to sort of make sure all the other developers in Germany or wherever around the world are aware of this stuff?

00:07:34: Because because I think that is one of our problems.

00:07:36: People don't know what we have.

00:07:39: Yeah. I mean, the right way is to go on conferences like that.

00:07:43: So again, we are very honored that you are attending our podcast today.

00:07:46: So but attending the conference and talk about those topics might be the right

00:07:50: step to just reach out to every single guy on this conference here.

00:07:54: So for the listeners, we are still on the Dock K&A conference this year.

00:07:58: And there are many DBAs here, but there are also very

00:08:03: high amount of developers here in this conference.

00:08:06: And I think our job is and that's basically what we are doing

00:08:10: and what I am doing three times today is doing presentations about Apex.

00:08:15: Because when we are talking about Apex, more people are deciding to use Apex

00:08:20: and to reach out to their companies and their bosses.

00:08:24: So maybe one thing Oracle could do, and this is not a prepared thing,

00:08:27: I just get it out of my head, maybe is supporting conferences on-prem.

00:08:33: Basically, after COVID, we can meet each other, we can spread the word for Apex.

00:08:38: And if we are able to reach as many people as possible to say that Apex is great,

00:08:43: then more people will see that Apex is great, right?

00:08:48: Yeah, no, you're right. I mean, you see this with developers a lot. It's like,

00:08:52: they want to do what, number one, they see other people doing. They will copy. It's like,

00:08:58: oh, he's doing that. Oh, I'll copy that, right? But they also are very fashion conscious. It's

00:09:04: like, what do people think is the popular thing for a developer to do today? And, you know, oh,

00:09:11: it was Java, you know, five years ago it was Java. Oh, Java is what's cool. And now it's like,

00:09:15: Python is cool or whatever. And what we really need to get is Apex, for example. It's Apex cool.

00:09:21: You know, how do we, you know, it's, you know, it's one of these, it's sort of a difficult

00:09:25: challenge because you have to do sort of this viral kind of marketing because other developers

00:09:31: will trust other developers more than they'll trust me. But they might trust you to tell them

00:09:37: what's really cool and productive. Sure. And that is something we noticed from the last years. I

00:09:44: think I'm eight years in this ecosystem, right? And I noticed from the first day on that the Apex team

00:09:50: is a little bit different than the other teams because they are reaching out. They're using

00:09:54: social media very heavily. They're talking to us in the conference. They're not just presenting and

00:10:00: disappearing there, just come to the parties, they catch us on the floor and say, "Hey, let's talk

00:10:05: about what are you doing with Apex and how can I support you with that?" And we saw the last month

00:10:11: or last year that the Apex team is growing and growing and this is a very good point for us to

00:10:17: see. We will see what are the plans for the future growth of Apex that would be very interesting for

00:10:25: for our developers, so what is the plan?

00:10:27: - Well, the interesting thing about Apex

00:10:29: is it's been around quite a while, right?

00:10:32: I think it started in 2002 or something like that.

00:10:37: So it's had a long time to mature

00:10:40: and the team running it, as you mentioned,

00:10:42: Mike Hitchwa, incredibly enthusiastic guy,

00:10:45: Mark Seitz, really good.

00:10:49: And they do consciously create a community

00:10:53: And I was giving Mike a hard time because he was telling me about all these great communities

00:10:59: for APEX.

00:11:00: And he's like, "Oh, in Germany and in Austria."

00:11:02: And it's like, "Okay, how about China?

00:11:05: Tell me about your community."

00:11:06: "Oh, we don't have anything there."

00:11:09: "What about Japan?"

00:11:11: And so, but Mike is this great guy.

00:11:13: It's like, so the next time I talk to him, "Okay, we're starting something in Japan and

00:11:16: China now.

00:11:17: We're going to go big there."

00:11:18: And he's going after him.

00:11:21: India. Actually, there's huge numbers of developers in India. So we are consciously trying to sort of

00:11:28: make APEX sort of into a virus that is spreading from one place to another.

00:11:34: Now, the interesting thing about APEX is that it's becoming a much more strategic technology

00:11:41: inside Oracle. So traditionally, inside Oracle, lots of people would build projects using APEX

00:11:48: themselves. But when we were building our applications, like Fusion, SAS, or NetSuite,

00:11:55: or whatever, GBUs, vertical applications, they never used Apex for those applications. They were

00:12:01: like, "Oh, we're real coders. We're going to use Java." And so pretty much everything is coded in

00:12:07: Java for our business applications. And we had this meeting... Well, actually, the real story is

00:12:14: During COVID, Larry Ellison, our founder of Oracle, got very excited about helping

00:12:21: the Oracle government monitor the uptake of vaccinations and various sorts.

00:12:29: And he wanted to build some applications for them. And he had a choice. He could either do

00:12:35: things the good old-fashioned way and get some Java developers to do something, or he could use

00:12:40: Apex. And so Larry's like, "Okay, let me try this Apex thing out." And he started working with Mike

00:12:45: Hitchwa and Shakib on his team and trying to prototype some applications for monitoring the

00:12:52: vaccinations. And Larry just got enthralled because they would show him their prototype

00:13:00: of the application and Larry would say, "Well, can you change that to a bigger font?" Or,

00:13:06: I don't like the text there.

00:13:07: Let's change it.

00:13:08: And Larry was just amazed how easy it was to customize

00:13:11: the app.

00:13:12: And he could personally do things,

00:13:13: which with a Java developer, imagine

00:13:16: trying to change something on the fly in front of Larry

00:13:19: in a meeting.

00:13:20: It's just not possible, right?

00:13:22: And so Larry got really excited about APEX.

00:13:25: And he went to our application developers, the Fusion SaaS

00:13:28: people, and said, hey, guys, why aren't you using APEX?

00:13:31: And they're like, oh, well, Apex is not for enterprise applications.

00:13:37: And you know, the usual story.

00:13:39: Even inside Oracle. That's very interesting.

00:13:41: No, it's like we use Java and we're Java developers.

00:13:44: Like we don't do Apex. You know that.

00:13:46: It's like, that's not, we're coders. We're heavy.

00:13:49: You know, we're, you know, macho coders.

00:13:51: And they gave Larry pushback.

00:13:55: And so Larry is like, okay, so you don't want to use Apex. Fine.

00:13:58: And then he talked to our people who do industry applications.

00:14:03: They do applications for banks or applications for telcos.

00:14:08: We call them vertical applications.

00:14:10: And these guys were much more interested in APEX.

00:14:12: And so we now have a policy going on where the people doing the vertical applications

00:14:17: are all going to use APEX.

00:14:20: And then, Larry, more recently, we bought this big company called Cerner.

00:14:25: Cerner is in the medical records business,

00:14:28: healthcare business.

00:14:30: And the first thing we did after we bought Cerner

00:14:33: is Larry said, "Okay, we're gonna build a new version

00:14:36: "of Cerner in Apex."

00:14:38: And so Larry is now sort of mandating Apex

00:14:41: all over the place in Oracle.

00:14:43: And that is actually gonna drive the Apex product

00:14:47: in interesting directions.

00:14:49: Because now, if you are just two guys building an Apex app,

00:14:53: it's pretty easy to collaborate.

00:14:55: But if you're a team of a hundred people,

00:14:58: Apex wasn't really designed for that, right?

00:15:00: And so one of the big things Mike is working on

00:15:03: is making Apex a much better player in these bigger

00:15:08: efforts to enable developers to collaborate

00:15:11: and do complex CI/CD pipelines

00:15:15: and all the kinds of stuff you need to do

00:15:17: in that kind of world.

00:15:18: So there's a lot of investment going on around Apex

00:15:22: just to support like these Cerner guys

00:15:24: and what we call the GPU guys who do vertical apps.

00:15:27: - Sounds so interesting.

00:15:29: So maybe we just make some advertisement

00:15:32: for the Apex Connect next year.

00:15:33: Maybe you can tell every developer on the conference

00:15:37: what's happening in Apex right now.

00:15:39: So I remember the time when the Apex team

00:15:41: was starting to work on those COVID apps

00:15:44: and we saw it on Twitter like in the middle of the night

00:15:46: and they were just exchanging each other

00:15:48: to have this solution after one weekend

00:15:51: which was pretty like a POC, which was thrown away.

00:15:55: That's what I was told.

00:15:56: But it was so interesting to see that the APEX team itself

00:16:00: is sitting there and building an APEX application

00:16:02: over the weekend to solve such a big need right now.

00:16:06: And they're working and seeing what the difficulties are

00:16:09: using APEX and they are building it in the next product.

00:16:12: It was a very, very cool story.

00:16:15: - Yeah, and I don't know if that application

00:16:18: is used in Europe.

00:16:19: I don't think it is.

00:16:20: But in the US, whenever you get vaccinated in the US, you get this text message

00:16:26: that basically says, click here and it takes you to an Apex application.

00:16:30: That's running.

00:16:31: You know, it's on your mobile phone.

00:16:33: It's really, you know, it's obviously running on a server and the Internet,

00:16:36: but it looks to a user like it's just a native mobile app.

00:16:39: It's very, very nice, very easy to use.

00:16:42: You know, it's a beautiful little application.

00:16:45: So for the next pandemic, we should stay

00:16:48: touch because in Germany we have the big players like SAP. So it was like T-Mobile, I think, and SAP

00:16:55: and they did a kind of a COVID app where you have this synchronized thing where everyone says I'm

00:17:03: positive and everyone else is notificated. Yeah, that's a different kind of contact tracing.

00:17:08: Right, and then we had another app which was the COVID pass, which basically when you were

00:17:12: vaccinated you get a QR code and scan it and then you get the certificate on your device and can

00:17:17: So next time we should say that Apex is the right solution because the money which went

00:17:23: to those two apps.

00:17:25: Yeah, we by the way did this all for free.

00:17:28: We did not, the US government did not pay us a dime for any of the stuff we did.

00:17:32: That's even more good to hear.

00:17:35: So next time, I will not hope that there will be a next time, we will provide an application

00:17:41: on the first weekend before everyone else can do something.

00:17:45: So now this was basically the Oracle part and stuff.

00:17:51: Maybe we can hear something in the following questions about Oracle too, maybe.

00:17:55: But we would like to know more about you.

00:18:00: So about your career.

00:18:02: So we have this basic question.

00:18:04: What's the wisest decision in your work life?

00:18:09: So when I left school, I went to work at a company called Hewlett Packard, HP.

00:18:17: HP was at the time a very famous company in tech.

00:18:22: I went to California.

00:18:24: I grew up on the eastern side of the US in Pennsylvania, and I went to school there.

00:18:28: And then my first job out of school was HP.

00:18:31: So I flew to California to what is now called Silicon Valley.

00:18:36: And so that was a very, you know, one of those fortuitous things is like, you know, I could

00:18:41: have worked anywhere, but I came to California, which turned out to be, you know, it's the

00:18:45: center of all the startups and the whole, you know, this is, it's still in the eighties,

00:18:50: you know, it's a long ancient history, but it turned out, you know, that was one of the

00:18:55: great career decisions I made.

00:18:57: And it was just luck.

00:18:58: It's like, okay, I got a good job offer from HP.

00:19:01: And then the job at HP was they were trying to build a new database.

00:19:07: And it turned out it was a relational database, a SQL relational database.

00:19:11: And so that's how I ended up sort of getting into the relational database market.

00:19:15: And at the time, there were no good products in that space.

00:19:19: There was Oracle and Oracle was on version five, which was a pretty primitive version

00:19:24: of the product.

00:19:25: And then there was one competitor, which is this company called Ingress.

00:19:29: Ingress is the predecessor of what now is called Postgres, right?

00:19:34: And Postgres was sort of the post as in the second, kind of the after project.

00:19:39: So Ingress was first done at the University of California, Berkeley.

00:19:44: And the professor who did the project was named Michael Stonebraker.

00:19:49: And basically the next generation of that project he called Postgres as a, you know,

00:19:53: post means after in Latin, right?

00:19:55: That's interesting.

00:19:56: I never thought about that.

00:19:57: But anyway, so Oracle and--

00:20:02: anyway, let's not go into Oracle.

00:20:04: But I was at HP at the time.

00:20:06: And then after being at HP about three years,

00:20:08: I sort of figured out--

00:20:09: HP is a hardware company.

00:20:12: And we were doing software at HP.

00:20:13: And at HP, they thought, oh, software

00:20:15: is something you give away for free for our hardware

00:20:18: customers.

00:20:19: And it's like, OK, that means they really

00:20:22: care about hardware.

00:20:22: They don't really care about software, because it's free.

00:20:25: So they don't make any money on it.

00:20:27: And so I sort of thought, oh, maybe I'll

00:20:31: go work at some startup.

00:20:32: And I got contacted by a startup that was, again,

00:20:36: building a relational database.

00:20:38: And this startup was called SVEL,

00:20:41: but it's not some company you would even have ever heard of.

00:20:44: But it was started by a bunch of IBM people.

00:20:46: IBM had been doing a lot of research in the database space.

00:20:50: In fact, IBM invented SQL.

00:20:53: That was done by their research lab.

00:20:55: So I went to this startup and again, it was one of these lucky things where the startup was in

00:21:03: sort of, I didn't realize it when I joined it, but they were sort of in a chaotic state. One

00:21:09: of the founders had unfortunately sort of died in an accident, which I won't go into here. And the

00:21:17: other founder took over and the engineers didn't like this guy. And so there was a lot of turmoil

00:21:22: there and it turned out luckily for me that like after about I would say about

00:21:29: nine months pretty much everybody quit and when we quit we were looking okay so

00:21:34: where where should we go and there were various opportunities for me there was a

00:21:39: company that was started by a bunch of HP people that I knew from my time at HP

00:21:43: it was called software publishing again you've never heard of them anymore

00:21:47: they were bought out by a company called Symantec which you may have heard of

00:21:51: That's from the antivirus stuff.

00:21:54: But they actually were related to that, although it wasn't antivirus.

00:21:57: But it was a software company that did a little tiny, sort of like a toy database.

00:22:04: There was Oracle.

00:22:05: I had a job offer from Oracle.

00:22:07: I had a job offer from another database company called Informix.

00:22:10: Informix was actually a very successful company into the 2000, 2010, and then IBM bought them.

00:22:19: And you know what happens when IBM buys you, you just like, the product goes into maintenance

00:22:23: mode and you never hear about them again.

00:22:25: But anyway, so I was choosing between these companies and I actually had decided to go

00:22:31: work for the software publishing because it was a bunch of HP people that I knew.

00:22:36: And so I, so Oracle gave me an offer and I said, "Eh, no, I'm not, I'm going to go to

00:22:41: this other company."

00:22:42: And they were like, "Well, okay, what if we doubled your offer?"

00:22:46: Not salary-wise, but more of the stock options and things.

00:22:49: It's like, "Okay, that's interesting."

00:22:53: And so I just decided to go to Oracle.

00:22:55: And it turned out one of the other guys I had been working with at this company called

00:22:59: Espel had gone to Oracle already.

00:23:03: So I already knew him.

00:23:05: And it turned out the other guy who was recruiting me from Oracle, it turned out had been recruiting

00:23:10: me when I was looking for a job after college to go to Xerox of all places.

00:23:15: There was a software operation at Xerox for this thing called the Star, which I won't

00:23:20: talk about, but it was the technology that actually was the ancestor of the Mac, what

00:23:25: became the Apple Mac.

00:23:27: He remembered me also, so I had these connections with Oracle that I didn't quite realize.

00:23:34: That was, again, one of my career decisions that turned out very fortuitous.

00:23:39: You go to Oracle when it's ... I thought Oracle was a fairly mature company at the time.

00:23:43: They had been around for about seven years.

00:23:47: However, their revenue was only like $5 million.

00:23:50: So they were very small.

00:23:52: They had like 130 employees.

00:23:54: I was employee number 130.

00:23:58: And so, you know, this is really lucky.

00:24:00: I could have gone to software publishing, which is the company that was one of these

00:24:04: forgotten companies because like nothing ever came of them.

00:24:07: But Oracle, fortunately, was the right choice.

00:24:10: And you know.

00:24:13: What an interesting story.

00:24:14: But I have the exact opposite.

00:24:17: You have the exact opposite question to that, right?

00:24:20: Yeah.

00:24:21: What's your biggest regret in your life?

00:24:23: Work life.

00:24:24: Yeah, I know.

00:24:25: You know, around the internet, there was this internet boom time in the early 2000s.

00:24:32: That again, you may not have been working by then.

00:24:35: Not yet, maybe.

00:24:37: But you probably remember a little bit of it.

00:24:39: And everybody at Oracle was leaving to go to one of these internet startups.

00:24:45: And one of them was this company called Webvan, which you've now, again, have never heard

00:24:49: of.

00:24:50: These guys were the first startup that came up with the idea of they would make an internet

00:24:57: website for shopping for groceries.

00:25:00: And it turned out at the time there was Amazon, which was this internet site for shopping

00:25:05: for mostly books at that time.

00:25:07: obviously evolved to lots more. And so groceries, it turned out, was one of these things that wasn't

00:25:15: a really good idea. And so I had my wife play around with shopping on their site, and she's

00:25:21: like, "This is really painful, and I want to touch those vegetables and see what's fresh."

00:25:26: And so it wasn't really a regret. It was one of these things where, like, I really wanted to go

00:25:33: there. But Oracle was actually also a good place. And so at some level, there is a sort of regret

00:25:42: that I didn't go to one of these startups then. But on the other hand, staying at Oracle turned

00:25:47: out to be again, it's like a better decision because Oracle continued to grow really fast,

00:25:53: even through the early 2000s, Oracle was very successful. And at the end of the day,

00:25:58: you know, betting against Larry Ellison is a bad idea. You know, he is one of the, you know,

00:26:04: there are a few really amazing entrepreneurs that sort of dominated the early software space.

00:26:10: There was Bill Gates at Microsoft, Steve Jobs at Apple, and Larry at Oracle. And these guys

00:26:16: are just geniuses, right? And so one of the best things I did was like, you know, going to one of

00:26:22: these startups is sort of like betting against Larry. And it's like, that's a losing proposition,

00:26:27: betting against Steve Jobs or betting against Bill Gates.

00:26:30: Those guys were just amazing, right?

00:26:32: Everything they did, more or less, you know, not every, you know,

00:26:35: they make mistakes just like everybody, but more often than not, they,

00:26:39: they were proven right.

00:26:41: Definitely. But before we end this podcast,

00:26:44: I want to squeeze in one question because one question, because we,

00:26:48: you talked about those tech geniuses, right?

00:26:51: So we had this question before.

00:26:53: So Elon Musk,

00:26:56: Everyone knows him and every other IT CEO right now is using social media.

00:27:01: Do you think this is a wise decision from them to tweet that much and that often?

00:27:06: Elon Musk is a very interesting character.

00:27:10: So if you'd asked me that question five years ago, I would have said, you know,

00:27:14: Elon Musk is obviously a genius.

00:27:16: His marketing of Tesla over social media and everything, all the stunts he did

00:27:22: were just amazing, you know, in marketing the product.

00:27:24: And, you know, I bought a Tesla.

00:27:25: But I can tell you now his act is getting a little old and I think people are getting

00:27:33: tired of him.

00:27:34: And the interesting thing is you look at like Larry Ellison, he's not on social media.

00:27:38: He has one tweet on Twitter as we learned from Donna McDonough.

00:27:41: So he has one single tweet but so many followers.

00:27:44: But yeah, and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, you know, those guys don't feel the need to act

00:27:49: out on social media.

00:27:51: I think at this point, social media obviously is really important for a marketing tool.

00:27:57: You can see people using it in really powerful ways.

00:28:01: Look at what happened in the United States with Trump.

00:28:05: He used Twitter to incredibly powerful means.

00:28:09: Then you can talk about the people spreading all kinds of disinformation also showing how

00:28:15: powerful it is as a medium.

00:28:17: Even in development, we are very conscious of trying to get stuff out there on LinkedIn

00:28:23: or whatever.

00:28:25: So we have people who are doing that sort of thing.

00:28:27: I don't personally spend a lot of time putting things out, but it is important to get on

00:28:33: the right channels.

00:28:34: So we reach, you asked earlier about developers.

00:28:37: You want to be on the social media sites or the sites where developers are there.

00:28:43: And that's one way of getting their attention.

00:28:45: Definitely. I mean, Twitter is one of the heaviest used communication system or communication

00:28:53: platform for every developer on this conference, right? So we are communicating and we are

00:28:57: getting our stuff from Twitter.

00:28:59: Really? So you mostly are using Twitter, not Stack Overflow or something?

00:29:04: Twitter is just for communicating in short sentences with one of each other. If we use

00:29:08: code and help and so on. We're using obviously Stack Overflow, Ask Tom and so

00:29:14: on and forums because we have more characters to put in. But for Twitter

00:29:19: it's just, hey look at this slide, this is nice information and you reach like

00:29:22: 10,000 people maybe sometimes. Another one saying, oh I like that tweet

00:29:27: and I retweeted to all my followers and that's the way the community was

00:29:31: build. And again, the Apex team is very heavy using Twitter. And that's the reason why we

00:29:39: are so close to them and see what's happening. So but it's great. Yes, as an executive vice

00:29:46: president for database server technologies at Oracle, that here is such a long title.

00:29:51: This episode must come to an end. And we were very glad to have you. It was very interesting for us

00:29:59: to hear what you have to tell us from the past and from now for the future.

00:30:05: And thank you very much and hope to see you soon in our podcast.

00:30:09: Yeah, my pleasure to be here and I'm glad I could talk to you and I'll be happy to

00:30:13: talk to you again if you want to sometime.

00:30:14: Great, thank you.

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