One of the most important ways that a project can help its developers is providing them good documentation. Actually, scratch that. Great documentation.

I noticed on Nico’s wiki (which is amazing by the way, it has so much information in it) a bunch of additional parameters for nqcmd other than those which are displayed in the default helptext (nqcmd -h).

These are the additional ones: [sourcecode] -b -w<# wait seconds> -c<# cancel interval seconds> -n<# number of loops> -r<# number of requests per shared session> -t<# number of threads> -T (a flag to turn on time statistics) -SmartDiff (a flag to enable SmartDiff tags in output) -P -impersonate -runas [/sourcecode]

Whilst perusing the Oracle database documentation, I noticed something which caught my eye:

As well as reading the documentation online as HTML or downloading as PDF for viewing on your computer etc, you can also download it in formats (Mobi and ePub) designed for eReaders such as the Kindle and iPad (the latter obviously isn’t “just” an eReader). For information on format support, there’s a handy table on Wikipedia.

It looks like the availability of mobi/epub files isn’t universal. For example, the OBI 11g documentation appears still to be HTML & ZIP only. And whilst the Database documentation doesn’t link to the mobi files on the contents page, only each document’s TOC, the Essbase documentation does:

I’m a geek. I like understanding things in their absolute entirety. It frustrates me to have to make presumptions or assumptions about something. I like to get down ’n dirty and find out what makes things tick.

So that necessitates reading manuals. And unfortunately, Oracle don’t make that easy all the time.

Some of the manuals are not very good, and others are difficult to find. Given the complexity of the OBIEE stack and proliferation of terminology and product names, sorting the wheat from the chaff can be a headache. Fair enough, for a corporation as big as Oracle with a product portfolio in the [hundreds? thousands?] creating a unified, comprehensive, easy-to-navigate point of reference for documentation must be near on impossible - but that’s their problem to figure out and mine to bitch about until it’s done ;-)