Congratulations, Jeff (and Neils, Peter and Elic)

Kellyn previosuly confessed to her DBA crushes.
I'm going to confess to being a PL/SQL Stalker. It's okay, I've confessed before and he didn't object :)

This time, Jeff got one step beyond in the Q3 playoffs for the PL/SQL Challenge. Congratulations (but I'll get you next time, and your little dog too). I'll take comfort in the thought that the top ten only had one player from England, mitigating slightly Australia's performance at the cricket in Adelaide. Distracting the poms with the UKOUG may have helped. [Yes, I did migrate from England to Australia. I'm allowed to make cheap remarks either way.]

In this current quarter's rankings, he's at 20th, while I'm a bit lower down at 27th. Okay, there are four from the UK in the top 30, but I'll gloss over that fact.

One reason for my stalking is that Jeff is a blogger working with PL/SQL in Australia, albeit a couple of thousand miles away (about 4000 kilometers by road). We did meet at an AUSOUG conference a few years ago.



The other place we cross paths is StackOverflow. As shown here, we are both members of that select group of people with the PL/SQL 'bronze' badge, and the Oracle 'silver' badge. Actually Tony Andrews, Vincent Malgrat and Andrew Clarke (APC) have also got their Oracle 'gold' badge. I might start stalking them too, and maybe Justin Cave as well. Be warned, if you stalk users in StackOverflow and find yourself agreeing with them, you'll probably vote them even higher.

An interesting feature of StackOverflow is that they do regular data dumps of all the questions, answers and comments. They've also got that installed on SQL Server Azure so you can actually run your own queries against the data. I've written one to keep track of the exact scores (as of the dump date) on a specific tag.  There I can see Jeff has 74 upvotes for the tag 'oracle10g' while I've only got 47.

But I am beating him in the 'oracle' and 'plsql' tags. So there !