Oracle says:
"The MVC award is a prestigious recognition awarded annually in the My Oracle Support Community to customer users who demonstrate an exceeding commitment to the ongoing success of their peers. These users go above and beyond to provide recognized correct and helpful responses to online requests for assistance, and they regularly, willingly, and selflessly share their hard-earned expertise and knowledge of Oracle products for the benefit and betterment of the wider community."
This is really an honour to be selected as one of nine people WORLDWIDE. Well, some of you may not know https://community.oracle.com as a separate website. You don't need to!
Most of the discussions can be found using a normal e.g. google search as the first lines of the posts are available without any Oracle login. You can also start with https://support.oracle.com as entry point and do a normal Knowledge Base search.
Then you do get two different results - one is the Knowledge Base Results, which is the official part of Oracle with bug notes, etc. - the other one is the Community Search Results.
That is the part, where people like me invest spare time to help others on a peer to peer base. Like with this blog, but based on direct questions/problems. You also get (sometimes/often) answers to e.g. releases which aren't under support (like XE or older versions). So, if you are looking for some help, try to search there or put in your own question.
If you want to create your own post with a question inside, you can do this either using the direct community web page, or you can go to the Technical Service Requests area of the Dashboard in support.oracle.com. If you press the "Ask in community" button, you get automatically routed to community.oracle.com. As I said, most people are answering there for free, with enthusiasm and in their spare time.
To get fast and helpful answers, ensure:
- First search for your topic, maybe it's answered already. If you find old (more than a year or two) posts which are still open/unanswered, don't ask there in a comment. Create your new, own post.
- If you write a new post, put in so many information as you can. Often questions are not answered, because there are things like edition, version,... missing.
- Don't say: You have to - we just do voluntary work for free, so be kind.
- Put your question in the right space and only once (you don't get any more help if you cross post things). Come back regularly to see, if someone has answered something or is asking for more input. If we ask some questions to understand YOUR problem and don't get any answer from the original poster... well...
- And don't forget: Mark your question if one of the answers helped you/is correct. So the next guy with the same question can see, there is a solution for his problem and does not need to open another post. If you find a solution by yourself, write it into a comment and close your original post. This also helps others!
- Last, but not least: Sometimes we need to say: Sorry, that is something for the Oracle Support, so you need to open a SR (which means, you need a support contract) and sometimes things are so complicated, that we need to say, we can't step further into a problem. Especially when it comes to reading traces, which could be something that needs days of time, we will not do that for free (but we will not ask you in the post blog for paid work, so if you want this, you need to ask us directly).
That's it, guys. 👌
Now to something different. As you can see, I do a lot things regarding Oracle and I like to help - and I am not alone. Therefore, if you do speak german, please follow the blog of my employer Robotron (I will also write there - with some colleagues). You will get a lot of information not only about Oracle, but also about other technologies. You can subscribe e.g. to the Robotron Blog (RSS) or just visit it from time to time at https://www.robotron.de/unternehmen/aktuelles/blog/.
