If I had five Oracle wishes, they would be.....

After 4 days of recovering from a case of food poisoning, with little else to do but consider my naval, I thought I'd rehash Brian Duff's post idea sometime back with my own little spin.

If I had 5 little Oracle wishes I'd like to come true, they would be:

5. Fix the email .zip issue - I don't know how many times I've emailed an Oracle employee with an attached .zip file, and had to change the .zip extension to .zippy or something else silly, to get through their email firewall. And the Oracle employees have to do the same thing too.

4. Allow more OTN forum markups - The OTN Forums are based on Jive Forum software. The Jive Forums allow a considerable amount of markup to enhance your posts (like BBCodes), yet it appears Oracle has disabled most of these. The Jive markup would allow me to include a mugshot of my smiling face in every post.... or maybe a screen shot or 2 of problems I've encountered best expressed in a picture.

3. Regular Oracle XE updates - the Oracle core database gets regular updates, including essential security fixes. Why not Oracle Express Edition (XE)? Surely they're mostly the same code base, and a new build of Oracle XE is only a couple good Ant scripts away?

2. Free ADF - JDeveloper is free, or kinda. There's this nagging little caveat that the JDeveloper IDE is free, but the ADF libraries are only free if you happen to own an OAS license. In the world marketing it's a false positive. Yes JDeveloper is free so it competes with other Java IDEs. But you wouldn't bother with JDeveloper without ADF, so essentially it's not free, because you have to buy an OAS license or similar. Confused? See now the messed up marketing message? Maybe JDeveloper and ADF should have the same unrestricted license of Oracle Apex?

1. Open Metalink to the web .... or Google I guess - to solve an Oracle problem I first search with Google, then I search Metalink. While I suspect Oracle will always want to protect the Support revenue base in Metalink, it would be nice if it wasn't so. Imagine the pure joy when school children around the world could spend their lunch times productively reading 11g bug reports rather than surfing for pictures of the Smurfs.

So what would your 5 Oracle wishes be?