Steven Feuerstein's Announcement

Reprinted with Permission by RevealNet, Inc. March 2001

Steven Feuerstein Joins Quest Software

From: The PL/SQL Pipeline
Conference: GOSSIP, Oracle and Otherwise
Date: February 16, 2001

It's not gossip. It's fact! On January 8, 2001, I joined Quest Software as a Senior Technology Advisor. We will be making formal announcements in the next couple of weeks. I consider the PL/SQL Pipeline a sort of extended family, so I wanted to let you all know first.

This is a significant move for me; it marks the first time since I started writing books on the Oracle PL/SQL language that I had "aligned" myself with any particular vendor of PL/SQL development tools. I believe that the many PL/SQL developers who use my books and attend my seminars deserve to know why I made this decision. And while there are probably some people who could give such an explanation in just a few sentences, if you've read my books you will understand why I will need a couple of pages!

I plan to make my time with Quest the high point of my career as a PL/SQL author, developer and trainer. This career in one sense started back in 1987 when I joined Oracle Corporation for a five year stint. In reality, though, my life as a "leading expert on the PL/SQL language" began when I published the first edition of Oracle PL/SQL Programming September 1995. Since that time, I have authored or co-authored seven books and quick references on PL/SQL (with an eighth, Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices, and a ninth, Learning Oracle PL/SQL, coming out in 2001). I have also presented seminars to thousands of developers, built the only third-party PL/SQL library, PL/Vision (now available as part of the Active PL/SQL Knowledge Base from Revealnet), and powerful code generation tools, including PL/Generator, and created and hosted (with the ongoing enthusiastic support of RevealNet) the very popular PL/SQL Pipeline. It has been a busy five years!

My objectives throughout this time were twofold:

Improve the ability of developers to take full advantage of the PL/SQL language and write truly excellent code. Programmers are a fortunate lot. We are paid, usually quite well, to sit in comfortable surroundings and use our brains (and fingers) to create software. I believe very strongly that we should honor this privilege by crafting code that we are proud of, that does its job well, that will be admired and appreciated by other programmers.
Generate as much revenue as possible. There – I admitted it. I love what I do, but let's be honest: it's also a job and it's important to be rewarded for what you do. And, to me, money is simply a means to an end, namely to work to increase the quality and quantity of justice in the world – but that's a story for a another time (or, at least, another website: www.stevenfeuerstein.com).

I have, of course, been very successful in my PL/SQL career, and in fact the entire "industry" surrounding PL/SQL (the language itself, product documentation, books, knowledge bases, integrated development environments, etc.) has improved and flourished during this same period.

PL/SQL IDEs: The Next Generation

Yet I have always felt there was much more to be done, particularly where it concerns tools for PL/SQL developers. There is no question that the tools available today, from Quest's high-end TOAD and SQL Navigator products to the shareware Easy SQL and dozens of others in between, are a drastic improvement over SQL*Plus and Notepad (not to mention Oracle's own ill-fated Procedure Builder). I feel in so many ways, however, that all these tools still represent only a first generation, fulfilling only a small part of their promise (a promise that is all too evident in tools available for other programming languages).

To put it most crudely, the current generation of tools help us build our code faster than every before, but they do relatively little to help us write better code faster. And that is part of the mission I bring to my job at Quest Software: to help design and develop tools that will help us all

Deliver Better Code Faster Than Ever Before

You will get a strong sense of what I mean by "better" from my upcoming Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices book (only 200 pages in length!). It is not enough, however, to describe best practices in books. We have to figure out ways to embed those best practices in the tools themselves. I have a whole bunch of ideas in this area and Quest is eager to help me implement them.

Which brings me back to the point of this letter: why I joined Quest. If my objective is to have the maximum impact possible on the day-to-day lives of PL/SQL developers and their ability to write great code, then Quest is the place to be. There are now over 114,000 developers using TOAD and SQL Navigator, vastly more than the other PL/SQL IDEs. Given the strength of the Quest R & D organization (and, to give each their due, the enthusiasm of their sales force!), I expect these numbers to grow for years to come.

Quest, in other words, is the dominant player in the Oracle IDE market, and that makes it the best place for me to work on the implementation of my ideas. Within Quest, I will be the voice of the PL/SQL developer, pushing for tools that contain the features we all need to transform our jobs.

Yet I do not plan to limit the impact of my ideas to Quest; that would not be serving the broadest population of PL/SQL developers possible. This takes me to the next element of my mission at Quest.
Strengthening the PL/SQL Developer Community
At the same time that I have decided to "brand" myself as a Quest employee, I also hereby publicly renew my commitment (with the explicit support of Quest) to strengthen the community of PL/SQL developers, and the resources available to them. I will do this in a number of ways, all with the active support of Quest:

I will continue my writing and expand my seminar schedule. I will be busy in 2001, in particular, with preparations for the third edition of Oracle PL/SQL Programming, considered by many to be the "bible" for PL/SQL developers. I will also hold at least two public seminars in the US, something I have not done for close to two years now.

We will create a site within the Quest corporate website where developers will be able to communicate with me and access resources to help them become experts in the PL/SQL language. To demonstrate our commitment to supporting developers in ways other than selling them products, Quest will make available on this site and at no charge all of the training materials that I have produced over the past five years, including those used in my ongoing seminar series.

I will continue to host and contribute to the PL/SQL Pipeline, one of the most active and altruistic locations on the internet for PL/SQL developers to get their questions answered, and share their knowledge and experience.

Quest will support open source initiatives, such as utPLSQL (a unit testing framework for PL/SQL that I wrote and is currently available through O'Reilly and Associates at http://oracle.oreilly.com/utplsql). ). The open source movement has had enormous impact in many other development communities, including Java, Perl, and XML. It is time to bring the power of networked intelligence to the world of Oracle as well.
I will help Quest establish channels of communication between developers around the world and our product development organization. TOAD has already demonstrated the effectiveness of building tools that respond closely to user needs. There is much more we can do in this area.

That's Just for Starters

I'm still finding my way around Quest and ideas are just beginning to percolate. I am very excited about the prospects for increasing my positive impact on the lives of PL/SQL developers world-wide. I am especially enthused about seeing my ideas for programmer tools translated from vision to reality.

In the coming year, I plan to continue to report to you on our progress in the many areas described above. Of course, it had better not take a report from me for you to see that progress. It should be evident in new resources on the web, new editions of my books, more trainings and better tools.

In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to drop me an email at steven@stevenfeuerstein.com.