Oracle Database Guides and DBA Nostalgia in the AI Era

Kris Rice's recent post about "a curated library of 100+ guides for working with Oracle Database" was nostalgic. We (shout out to Joel Tuisl and JR Mariottini) used to hand out V$ View posters at user group meetings and in the TUSC conference booth. DBAs would line up for autographs from Richard Niemiec, author of many performance tuning manuals and mentor in my early professional life. Gurus like Rich achieved rock-star status because so much of the world runs on Oracle, and keeping that data available matters.

But this wouldn't be a post in the #AI era if I didn't mention how life is changing.

Oracle has been marketing the self-managing, self-healing, self-tuning capabilities of its Enterprise Database for decades. But the library of agentic markdown files published by Oracle's SVP (see comment below) strikes me as the greater inflection point. While I am not one, I assume DBAs are as shocked as I am by the capabilities of Anthropic Opus 4.6 and other agentic AI tools, specifically when it comes to managing and tuning #EnterpriseDatabase.

Oracle DB Skills here.