I’ve been a SQL*Plus and SQL Developer user for about 10 years now, and there are still many features, commands, etc. I’m not familiar with. In fact, most days I feel as if I’ve barely scratched the surface of what the tools can do. Lately I’d been feeling that SQLcl was something I should know more about.

I’d watched a couple of online tutorials, read a few blog posts, and saw Galo Balda present on SQLcl at RMOUG last February, so I was becoming more acquainted, but still a little uncertain about what it could do for me.

I reached out to my favorite Senior Principal Product Manager at Oracle, Jeff Smith, to see if he’d be willing to follow up one on of his many offers to do a web-ex with my team and do some virtual training.  He graciously agreed he would, and last week, gave a one hour virtual demo and talk on SQLcl and SQL Dev for myself and a few of my colleagues.

After Jeff’s talk,  I downloaded SQLcl, got to the command prompt, but the screen looked nothing like what I’d seen others do, and I couldn’t figure out how to access the configuration settings. It was time for an intervention.

I reached out to Jeff once more. After a quick 5 minute chat, he steered me in the right direction on how to format SQLcl the way I wanted to – once again saving me hours of “googling” down the wrong path to get a simple answer.

This wasn’t the first time Jeff had answered an SOS call from me– far from it! In fact, our professional relationship began with my reaching out to him on Social Media over three years ago, to help resolve some issue I was having – I don’t remember what the topic was – but I do remember I sent him a message on Twitter, and he came back with the answer for me in about 5 minutes.  One Q&A via Twitter lead to a few more over time, eventually email contact and then attending some of his excellent talks at Kscope15.

Through the years, he’s been a steadfast, reliable technical resource for me who has always been there to answer the tough questions, provide teaching moments, be a mentor, and who I’m now lucky enough to consider a friend.

Google is a life-saver in our daily lives, but sometimes real human interaction is needed to get you over a hurdle. Don’t be afraid to reach out to your product managers for the tools you use. You may even make a new friend.