Quest Pipelines

I've been an Oracle developer for around 8 years. For the first few years I was on my own, a PL/SQL book and Metalink was all I had to find my way in the Oracle darkness. As my experience grew the books became less of an aid and Metalink is often like looking for a needle in a haystack. So I had a look around at the various forums around, they were all much of a muchness, but one just seemed to be much more of a community than the rest. That was Quests Pipelines, what was great about it was that 1. people answered the questions quickly and 2. there were a lot of people answering. I've always found that you get just as much by answering questions than you do asking them, most of our time as developers is spent on mundane repetitive tasks or at least on stuff that doesn't push the boundaries of SQL too much. Maybe once or twice we need to do something a little more complex, something we haven't done before. But on a forum there are literally hundreds of people having these once or twice a year moments on a daily basis, by being involved in a forum you can tackle these sort of problems on a regular basis, his improves your skills by exposing you to things you might never have looked at.

The reason I mention this is that Lenz Grimmer mentioned the pipelines in his blog earlier today. In addition to the Oracle pipelines (one each for DBA's and Developers) there is also a MySQL Pipeline, the pipeline contains a forum, a regular monthly tip and articles. The MySQL pipeline has been open for about a year and I've been a sysop almost from the start, however visitor numbers have been low, I think that's in part to the great forums run by MySQL themselves. But I think there is room for more than one MySQL forum on the web so come on over and say high.