Win a Copy of the New Oracle Multimedia Book!

My good friend, Marcelle Kratochvil, is the Oracle ACE Director for (as she put it to me) "all data/any data." She's been working with Oracle since V4 and specializes in Oracle Multimedia. She has been a beta tester for this product since Oracle8i and runs a SIG on multimedia and unstructured data. Check out her blog at: http://eternal-donut.blogspot.com.au.

Marcelle is a great speaker and able to communicate clearly how to work with complex data in Oracle. I first met and worked with Marcelle when she flew up from Australia to speak at my first Oracle PL/SQL Programming conference in November 2005). And now she's written her first book!

Managing Multimedia and Unstructured Data in the Oracle Database has just been released by PackT and covers everything a person will need to know to get them working in multimedia. And Marcelle should know; as CTO of Piction, she works with customers all around the world including major museums and universities. She performs database administration on multi-terabyte Unix and Windows environments as well as doing serious development work with PL/SQL. She has designed and built a multimedia search engine, e-commerce system, security system, reporting engine, shipping system and her own XML parser and language specifically to handle the workflow needs of managing multimedia.

The book, according to Marcelle, provides an introduction to multimedia, how to search on it, how to manage it and how integrate it into your current environment. With lots of PL/SQL examples and schema setup scripts, Marcelle promises that this book will get you loading and using unstructured data in no time at all.

Best of all (to me), Marcelle is a strong advocate of PL/SQL and recommends it for anyone to use for building web based applications and for working with multimedia. My kind of Oracle technologist. J

To encourage us to check out her book, Marcelle is offering a chance to win a copy. All you have to do is choose from the most relevant section below, and send your answer to the question to Marcelle at marcelle@xor.com.au. Marcelle tells me that "The best, most creative and accurate answer will win a copy of the book." You must submit your answer by 31 May, 2013.

1. Open Category (open to everyone): Name three key advantages for storing multimedia in a database.

2. Museum/Gallery/Print Media (open to anyone in these industries): What is the biggest issue you face when digitizing and managing any multimedia in your organization?

3. Oracle (open to any Oracle employee):  Name five Oracle products that are tightly integrated with Securefiles and Oracle Multimedia.

 4. Oracle ACE Program (open to any Oracle ACE or ACE Director):  Which Oracle development tool or product is best designed for working with unstructured data (including multimedia)?