One of my Oracle heroes has died - farewell to Lex de Haan 13422386 1019544571447648 7687716130941590224 o1

One of my Oracle heroes has died – farewell to Lex de Haan

On Saturday I was shocked to read the announcement in the newspaper of the death of Lex de Haan. Even though, after the earlier reports on his physical condition, it was not a real surprise, it was very sad news all the same. Lex was such a vibrant, energetic person, it is hard to believe he is dead. Lex was one of my instructors when I started doing Oracle in 1994, when he was working in Oracle Education in The Netherlands. Only later did I realize what an Oracle expert Lex really was. It also took a little while to find out how terribly nice he was – behind that somewhat imposing exterior. He was tall, wore a moustache and frowned a lot. However, like I said: he was incredibly nice.

Lex was an esteemed member of the highly regarded OakTable Network. He had started his own firm, NaturalJoin, and organized the OakTable seminars with high ranking speakers like Tom Kyte, Steve Adams and later this month Jonathan Lewis. The seminars are very well attended by a somewhat elite-crowd. And extremely well organized! He should have presented one himself, being a worldwide expert on SQL! We make grateful use of his book Mastering Oracle SQL and SQL*Plus, published in 2005 by the OakTable Press.

Within Oracle has Lex played an important role in Education around
the Oracle Database. A lasting memory of his involvement is his entry
in the EMPLOYEES table in HR schema:

SELECT *
FROM HR.EMPLOYEES
WHERE employee_id = 102
/

EMPLOYEE_ID FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME
----------- -------------------- -------------------------
EMAIL PHONE_NUMBER HIRE_DATE JOB_ID SALARY
------------------------- -------------------- --------- ---------- ----------
COMMISSION_PCT MANAGER_ID DEPARTMENT_ID
-------------- ---------- -------------
102 Lex De Haan
LDEHAAN 515.123.4569 13-JAN-93 AD_VP 17000
100 90

 

Thank you, Lex. For being the person you were. You will be missed a lot.

 

5 Comments

  1. Marco Gralike February 8, 2006
  2. Steven Feuerstein February 6, 2006
  3. Sue Harper February 6, 2006
  4. Erik Kerkhoven February 6, 2006
  5. Andre Crone February 6, 2006