David T. Bath
David T. Bath is a computer professional and the original creator of the non-DBA Oracle FAQ for the (now deprecated) comp.databases.oracle Usenet newsgroup. This site (orafaq.com) was developed as a follow-up to the original Oracle FAQ when David was unable to continue his effort in 1995.
Biography[edit]
David worked on a number of multi-user operating systems since 1974, including DG, TOPS-20, GCOS, MS-DOS, CPM, PRIMOS, VMS and UNIX, but he classified himself as primarily a UNIX fan. He also worked on a number of database management systems, including the Oracle database, Ingres, Informix, PostgreSQL and Unify RDBMS.
His major studies include pathology, a major influence on his designs of database schemata and software suites.
Creation of the non-DBA FAQ[edit]
On 15 January 1993 David posted a proposal for a General (non-DBA) Oracle FAQ [1] on the comp.databases.oracle newsgroup. Soon thereafter he posted the first historic version of his FAQ on the 2nd of February the same year[2]. An ASCII version was also uploaded to the ftp.uni-oldenburg.de server.
Strangely enough the biggest FAQ of them all was "Would someone please tell me where to find FAQ for this group?". This was commonly referred to as YAFR (Yet another FAQ request)[3].
As the FAQ was getting larger and larger different file formats were considered. At first the WinHelp format was suggested, but was rejected by 65:35 in favour of ASCII[4]. On 1 November 1993 Frederick Roeber suggested [5] that the FAQ be formatted as HTML. The first HTML version of the FAQ was announced on 23 December 1994[6], and hosted by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's Business Faculty (now RMIT University).
