asked
Merging in some Oracle questions
This is less of a question, and more a heads-up. Later today, the OSQA guys will be smoothly merging in some questions from Oracle Overflow - a Q&A site which is struggling. The plan is that the influx of content, albeit Oracle content (which will be appropriately tagged), will bring fresh ideas to ASK, and naturally increase the breadth of content we host. The plan is to make the merge happen at 12pm GMT tonight (unless there are strong objections why that should not be the case), at which point the site will be down for 10 minutes while Hernani works his merging magic. The questions should also be appropriately interspersed throughout the existing content, rather than getting dumped at the top of the current "pile", so it shouldn't impede your day-to-day ASKing. In theory, apart from the very brief hiccup of downtime (go and grab a nice cup of coffee), you shouldn't even notice a difference. If you have a compelling reason why the merge should happen at a different time, then please speak up. Otherwise, hold on to your hats!
Thanks for the advance notice Chris and all the best to Hernani while he is doing this work. Is there anything site users can do after the merge has taken place to help out and where should problems (if any are found) be referred to?
Good point. Any particular person or email address to get in touch with?
Excellent point. For now, send any issues to admin[@]
ask.sqlservercentral.com, and I'll field it from there. If I get a better answer from Hernani & co, I'll update this.
Update: If you encounter any problems, drop a report in [
jira.osqa.net](
http://jira.osqa.net/secure/Dashboard.jspa), as Mike & Hernani will make sure they have some people keeping an eye on it.
Chris. the import doesnt seem to have broken anything but I am not sure the tagging is right.... To the right of this question it currently shows a section called Tags and lists the count of questions for each tag of this question. the Oracle Tag has 342 currently. If you click that tag it takes you to a search/filter screen where all question with that tag are shown. On *that* screen the number is currently showing as 299 Oracle questions. Is there an orphaned tag somewhere in a reference table possibly? Please pass on our gratitude to Mike + Hernani and the OSQA team for a well planned and executed piece of work. When things happen like this its a pleasure to get upgrades and enhancements to the site.
So, I just tweeted to you about this and it's still in my head.... As we now host Oracle questions (Hi to all the new users and welcome to our forum :) ) new questions will have to be tagged as either Oracle or SQL so that the answers are relevant. Can OSQA give us a mandatory option to select SQL or Oracle when a question is asked please? This will ensure the moderators can cope and that all questions are categorised correctly.... Until then, can we add a permanent note on the right of the forum to make this requirement as clear as possible please?
I do not think it should be mandatory to tag it to one or the other. Lots of questions here about normalization and database theory will apply equally to both (and all other RDBMS' for that matter). Likewise, career and personal development type questions would often appeal to both camps.
