In my continuing series of postings with interviews from Kaleidoscope presenters and attendees alike, this week I had the chance to talk with Sue Harper, Senior Principal Product Manager for Database Development Tools at Oracle. For many years now Sue has been a great advocate and supporter of ODTUG, most recently promoting Oracle SQL Developer. She has been at Oracle since 1992 and is currently based in London. Sue is a regular contributor to magazines, maintains a technical blog, and speaks at many conferences around the world.
When I asked Sue to help me with this interview, her response was “I can’t believe we’re on to this year’s events. I’ve still not recovered from last years!”.
MR: Which presentation of yours is a “can’t miss” session that Kaleidoscope attendees should plan on attending, and why?
SH: “You only accepted one of my papers, so naturally that’s a “can’t miss” 
Anyhow, we have a few nice papers from the SQL Developer team. I think the SQL Developer Data Modeler: From Soup to Nuts is an important talk to see. This talk walks through the tool at a high level, introducing the broad scope of functionality offered by the product.”
MR: Who else should Kaleidoscope attendees plan on seeing a session from, and why?
SH: “We have run many hands on sessions showing the integration of the open source Subversion version control tool with SQL Developer. These sessions have exposed the general need for best practice or at the very least, advice from experienced developers.Kris Rice is presenting on Multi-User Access and Version Control for SQL and PL/SQL Files where he will talk about the flow of work when working with PL/SQL files in a multi-user environment.”
MR: What differentiates Kaleidoscope as a conference from other conferences out there?
SH: “This is a great conference for sharing experience and learning from the community.”
MR: If you’ve been to Washington before, can you recommend one thing that a first time visitor should take advantage of while visiting during Kaleidoscope?
SH: “I’ll leave that to the locals.”
Thanks Sue for your time and answering my questions!
Sue has been busy lately, as her new book “Oracle SQL Developer 2.1” is now available from Packt Publishing.
I was provided a copy of the book from the publisher, and I offer up the following thoughts on the book. If you’d like to see a sample chapter from the book, please click here.
I’ve been using Oracle SQL Developer for several years now, and the product just keeps getting better and better with each release. This book is well suited to both beginners and advanced users. The product is covered from the basics of installation, the tips and tricks that may not be evident to all such as some of the preference settings, all the way through extending Oracle SQL Developer and integrating with Subversion.
On the plus side, there is a chapter on the SQL Developer Data Modeler, which is a fairly long chapter in the book at around 65+ pages. On the minus side, the new unit testing framework is not included in the book (maybe a future edition?). All in all, this is a great book.
There is no better place to learn about SQL Developer than from the Senior Principal Product Manager herself. If you use SQL Developer, my suggestion for you is to include this book in your technical library. It is available in print version, or in Adobe PDF eBook version as well.
