Oracle FAQ:Year end report 2008

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This report documents the highlights and lowlights of 2008, OraFAQ's 13th year on-line. During 2008, this site was visited by almost 3,5 million unique users (compared to 3.08 million in 2007). This resulted in 230 million page hits over 10.7 million visitor sessions. In total we disseminated 1.2 TB of Oracle related traffic on the Internet.

OraFAQ Highlights

We upgraded to a newer and faster server in December 2008. The old server could not carry the load anymore and caused the site to be dreadfully slow at times. Here are the details:

Old server New server
Saint Louis, United States Frankfurt, Germany
AMD Athlon64 3000+ (single core)

2GB DDR-RAM;
2 x 160 GB/ 7200 RPM disks

AMD Opteron 2344HE (quad core)

4GB DDR2-667 ECC RAM
2 x 250 GB/ SATA II 7,200 rpm disks

The OraFAQ Forum

Some of the noteworthy events and forum reorganizations that took place:

  • New SQL and PL/SQL forums were created to replace the old SQL & PL/SQL Newbies, SQL Experts and PL/SQL Experts forums.
  • The OS/390 (mainframe) forum was removed and the messages moved to the Other Operating Systems forum.
  • Old forum messages (from 1998 to 2001) that were archived on the Wayback Machine were re-imported into the forum.

Congratulations to the following new moderators appointed in 2008:

Year end statistics:

  • Topics created: 14,151 (slightly down from 15,259 in 2007)
  • Messages posted: 75,603 (down from 77,398 in 2007)
  • Users registered: 11,303 (down from 12,982 in 2007)

Detailed forum statistics, as compiled by Michel Cadot, are available at forum statistics.

The OraFAQ Wiki

The Wiki grew from 850 articles in 2007 to 1,098 in 2008. The old FAQs were also moved to the wiki. As a result the wiki became, after the forum, the second most popular section of this site.

The Wiki was also promoted to this site's home page for a couple of months, but subsequently moved back again.

Oracle-l and USENET archives

The Oracle-l mailing list as well as the Oracle USENET Newsgroups are archived on this site. These resources are still heavily used, but are declining in popularity year after year. 2008 was, unfortunately, no exception. Here are the statistics:

Oracle-l mailing list:

  • 9,317 mailing list posts were archived, down from 11,455 in 2007.

USENET news:

On a side note, the LazyDBA mailing list service was terminated in December 2008 when their website suddenly became unavailable. Unfortunately they've declined OraFAQ's prior requests to archive their messages here. A big loss to the community!

Blogger platform

Users posted 32 blog entries on the OraFAQ (down from 56 in 2007). Our top blogger of 2008 is Mohammad Taj.

Oracle Highlights

Oracle Corporation launched the following new products and services in 2008:

  • First patch set for the Oracle 11g database was delivered;
  • Oracle Exadata, a HP Oracle Database Machine for fast warehouse applications;
  • Oracle Beehive, a Collaboration Platform to replace Collaboration Suite;
  • Availability of Oracle products via Amazon's cloud computing infrastructure.

Desupported products:

  • Oracle 9i is now out of support (except for companies that paid for Extended Support).

Oracle's most noteworthy acquisition of 2008 was BEA Systems. Some of their other acquisitions include: Captovation (Document capturing); Empirix (Web application testing); Skywire (Insurance software); Global Knowledge Software (Technical Writing/Training Authoring software); ClearApp (Application management); Primavera Systems (Project Portfolio Management) and Haley Limited (Policy modeling and automation).

2008 will also be remembered as the year Oracle increased their prices by 15% to 20% on most of their products, most notably the Oracle database and BEA Weblogic server.

Summary

In summary, site usage is up from 2007, but our forums were slightly less busy in 2008. Unfortunately the Oracle-l mailing list and USENET newsgroups continued their year after year decline in popularity. On a positive note, the new server should help us to grow the site to new heights in 2009.

Thank for your continued support and contribution to this site's success. May you all have a great and prosperous 2009!

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