Does Oracle 10g knowledge transfer to EBS?

March 11, 2007 3:48 PM

Can a person experienced in Oracle Forms 10 easily move to Oracle EBusiness Suite?

OK, I'm a hiring manager with bugger-all Oracle knowledge. Say I have a customer with a requirement for Oracle EBusiness Suite development and support, and an employee with heaps of Oracle 10g Form Builder experience, can I stick these two together fruitfully?

I guess I need a bit of a canned education of what makes up EBS, but I'm presuming the PL/SQL knowledge is transferable between the two? Does the whole Oracle Forms thing go out the window with EBS, or is there some other transferable knowledge there?

Would I be better off sending them a Java programmer?

posted by pivotal to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

I'm an Oracle PLSQL/Workflow developer at the moment. I don't do any of the Forms work where I'm employed but I talk to the Forms developers and I'm participating in my employer's move to the EBS since Workflow is changing a lot, too. However, all that follows is my opinion only.

Strong SQL and PL/SQL knowledge is something all Oracle developers should have. I've seen some god-awful SQL statements written by non-database programmers. Bad SQL can absolutely destroy otherwise good software as the user load increases. An Oracle developer needs to know what is good and bad SQL and what the latest features of PL/SQL are. So, "just a Java programmer" without a couple of years' experience with Oracle is not a good idea.

I think anyone with a true computer science degree less than 10 years old will have some exposure to a language like Java. People (like myself) who have been out of school longer than that might require more grilling if their resumes show no Java/C#/etc. experience. I say that because the structure of their programs are going to be so very different from that of their Forms solutions.

Any Oracle Forms developers who haven't gotten nervous and already started to study up on the ESB are doomed. If they are resourceful at all, they've probably at least read articles like Forms Functionality in J2EE or gone through this this tutorial. Skimming those should give you some good interview questions.

Please, please remember, all of this is just my opinion. I may think of more things in coming days but my email is in my profile if you want to ask something more specific.
posted by loosemouth at 4:27 PM on March 11, 2007

Response by poster: OK so is a Forms developer with zero Java more useful than a Java developer with a modicum of SQL, or visa versa? =)
posted by pivotal at 5:45 PM on March 11, 2007

If it were me hiring, a Forms developer with a fairly recent (< 10 years) CS degree would win out over that Java developer. Only because I think the Forms developer would know Oracle's quirks and would know how to get the job done when something out of the ordinary comes up that JDeveloper might not easily handle.
posted by loosemouth at 6:18 PM on March 11, 2007