I guess more accurately, who is Scott, since it’s really scott/tiger.
If you’re not familiar, scott used to be one of the seeded users that came with a fresh Oracle DB install. His password was tiger. Here’s the story.
Bruce Scott was one of the first employees at Oracle, and his daughter had a cat named Tiger. Not a very strong set of credentials, but we’re talking about 30 years ago.
I haven’t done an Oracle install in many years. I’m in Apps, remember? However, from what I read around the interwebs, it looks like the scott schema was removed mid-decade. Not a bad run for a demo user though.
Wondering what the point is here? Or maybe you’re accustomed to ramblings by now.
Anyway, while perusing OraNA today, I found this nugget from the PeopleSoft Tipster.
Can anyone confirm whether these are real people or just virtual PeopleSoft characters?
Ah, those People people, they are creative and whimsical.
While we have sober conference room numbering schemes at corporate HQ, their conference rooms are themed, e.g. the James Bond movie theme on Paul’s floor.
I wonder which is truly easier to remember, the logical naming scheme based on location or the themed naming scheme? I guess it depends on whether you get the thematic reference or not, e.g. if you don’t know any James Bond movies, you’re a bit befuddled when someone says the morning meeting will be in Thunderball.
I had to laugh because EBS also has several default users that are old friends, like Pat Stock. Not that it mattered, but I always wondered if Pat were a man or a woman. That was probably the point, all those years ago, i.e. to pick a gender ambiguous name. I know there are others in EBS, whose names escape me right now. It’s been several years since I mucked around in a demo environment of EBS too.
To the point. Creating demo data is way harder than you’d imagine. You’ll know this if you’ve ever done so.
That was probably the toughest part of writing system test plans and system testing because you already know how to test the product and how to (try to) break it. The annoying mundane work is arguably the creative stuff, i.e. creating demo data out of thin air.
I have a friend who’s been in network operations forever, and they always argued over server naming. Typically, it was one geeky cult vs. another, e.g. Star Wars planets vs. Star Trek villains.
Anyway, I usually run out of ideas after a couple tries. Then it’s back to vanilla variations on Test and Foo.
It would be fun to start a list of famous dummy data. So, if you know of any, Oracle or otherwise, put it in comments.
Its not a demo account but the old default system/manager combo features in the first of Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta novels. You can see it if you search Google Books with the following :
system manager intitle:postmortem inauthor:cornwell
About name…??? I had found someone configure server names like that. Example: ox, cow ,…
By the way, that's a good interesting about “scott”, but i have to lock or drop him from my database.
😉
my dummy data is whomever happens to be sitting next to me. which gives me an idea, i think my next project i'll have a jake/kuramot schema password.
Agreed, generating demo data is hard. Fun if you know the intended audience, though, and can throw in a few chuckle-worthy references. Our EBS training system was populated with Steelers players when we rolled out Advanced HRMS.
scott and his cat still exist in the example schemas, if installed, though the account is typically expired and locked during installation, since it's a common attack vector.
I've always gravitated toward Babylon 5 characters as my server-naming convention, because the names tend to be short. Of course, the trend nowadays seems to be dry, boring numbering schemes. Probably all for the best; with the number of servers people have to manage these days, one would probably get into pretty obscure territory in the chosen namespace (“that machine? Oh yeah, the green dude from Season 8, Episode 12, right.”).
*ahem* Yeah, I'm sure that's just the sort of DBA nerd/science fiction dork commentary you were looking for to enrich this conversation. 😉
I know it seems soulless, but I've always preferred a numeric scheme, consistent from floor to floor, for labeling meeting rooms. Easier to map if I'm headed to unfamiliar territory.
Don't like the current trend of using numbering schemes either. This is one of the last few areas where you can still have a little offbeat fun with your work.
I've always been partial to retired Hispanic baseball players…don't know why, they just always seem to come to mind. Luis/Tiant, Orlando/Cepeda, Julian/Javier, Cesar/Geronimo, Davey/Conception…can't wait for Coco Crisp to retire 😉
I worked one place where our machines were all named after Lord of the Rings characters (boo, because I'm not in to LOTR, so they just seemed like ridiculous words) and another place, which was an old malt house, where all the meeting rooms were named after something to do with brewing beer (hooray!).
I'm sure that sci fi names are common – a decade ago, most of our IT servers had Star Trek names, and even today there's a “troi” server floating around.
A couple of years ago, our building initiated a contest to rename our meeting rooms (which have wonderful names such as “Engineering Conference Room 2″). Since our building was (at the time) exclusively involved in fingerprint identification technology, a couple of us were pushing the idea of naming the rooms after some of the pioneers of fingerprint identification – the Vucetich room, the Henry room, and so forth. Unfortunately, the rooms today have names such as…”Engineering Conference Room 2.” (OK, there is a “Newport Beach room,” but it's a windowless closet.)
Our experience shows that you're never going to get a consensus on dummy naming, because people have different experiences – the Family Guy fan and the 1961 Yankees fan aren't going to find common ground. Things work best if you give a single person dictatorial power over the naming structure. When I have such power, I gravitate toward U.S. presidents, co-workers, and random cities with various levels of meaningfulness (Espoo, Schmelz, Aarau, Guasti, Gresham…).
But the next time that I'm entering a fake criminal record at a trade show demonstration booth, I promise to try to remember to use “Kuramoto” as the last name on the fake criminal record. You're welcome.
You're making an assumption that would be a fake record 🙂
Naming is fun, unless you have to do it frequently, which is the problem with demo data. Like I said, my creative juices usually run out after a couple records, then it's just another chore of testing.
Good one, I was trying to think of a more recent trend in geeky naming and didn't think of LOTR. That one may be out of vogue with older geeks b/c they used it back in the day when fewer people had a clue.
+1 for beer-themed conference rooms.
A Dodger fan and no Davey Lopes?
I like theme names better, but they are confusing if you're going to a new place, e.g. PSFT old HQ.
Corporate probably has a hundred or so conference rooms, so naming them might get to be a chore, to my point about creativity having a lifespan.
+1 for Steelers dummy data. The problem in recent years is free agency forces you to change your DNS too much 🙂 So, either change porter55 and repopulate or go with old school types, which is good too.
“Dude, lambert58 and stallworth82 need more memory.”
You made my point about conference naming, which I'm sure lots of unknowing Oracle corporate types hit when they started going to Pleasanton looking for the Moonraker conference room.
What has two fingers and loves the “DBA nerd/science fiction dork commentary”? This guy. Have we met?
Funny man as always, check out @azp74 (further down in the thread) for a better idea. Beer. Unless you played that out already.
Interesting, were they Chinese new year animals? That's a good one, if you have a 12 servers to name.
And yes, you should make sure scott's locked down, per @jpiwowar's comment on its being a common attack vector.
Nice one, and not entirely obvious.
I worked at a place that had all the servers named after beers. We were doing a y2k project, and someone jokingly complained about server y2k violating the standard. I pointed out that someone had indeed trademarked y2k beer (on the gummint uspto site).
There used to be a list published yearly of most popular node names. Whatever happened to that? I seem to recall Star Trek names topping the list.
Someone named a bunch of the servers and user ID's I deal with now including a reference to the city or site they were in when they were created. Bad idea, they are in a different city now. Some moved to a different city that existed in the org at that time, too. With a virtualization project going on, it's even worse…
I once put in one of my kids' baby pictures on an employee id portal I was demoing. That got a big smile from everyone. But they wound up getting a different system.
Great post and comment thread. Reminds me of this: http://www.nbrightside.com/blog/2006/07/21/smok…
Nice, I had to look up Norman Whiteside, but still funny.