In January 2002, Mogens Norgaard of Miracle A/S Denmark invited Jonathan Lewis to present his seminar "Optimising Oracle - Performance by Design" as the Miracle Masterclass 2002.
As a generous and openhearted individual, Mogens threw out an invitation to various leading lights in the Oracle community to attend the seminar (for entertainment purposes, rather than learning, of course), and this invitation was taken up by, amongst others:
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Steve Adams of IXORA, Cary Millsap and Jeff Holt from HOTSOS, Jonathan Lewis of JL COMPUTER CONSULTANCY Anjo Kolk of ORAPERF and YAPP fame, John Beresniewicz, James Morle (author of Scaling Oracle 8i) from SCALE ABILITIES LTD, Stephan Haisley from the ORACLE CENTRE of EXCELLENCE in Denver, Lex de Haan, manager of ADVANCED SERVER CURRICULUM in Oracle Education, and of course Mogens Norgaard and others from MIRACLE A/S in Denmark.
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Naturally, Danes being the generous hosts that they are, Mogens Norgaard also offered his home to all and sundry, and the evenings regularly degenerated into anarchic, multitasking , discussions around Mogens' oak dining table of how Oracle could, would, or should have worked under different circumstances. And possibly in all those concurrent conversations, perhaps the two most frequent comments were:
At some fairly ridiculous hour of the last morning, it dawned on those members of the group that were still awake, that they had been through many hours of peer group review, and that there was a great deal of benefit being able to bounce ideas off other people who thought about and tested Oracle in similar ways. And so, in honour of Mogens' dining room and the piece of furniture which had supported eleven laptops, 800 metres of cable and numerous bottles for those long nights - The OakTable Network was born and www.oaktable.net was registered.
The OakTable Network is not a commercial organisation; it is a loose association of like-minded people who make their livings from their expertise with the Oracle database engine and their skill at handling performance issues. But, they do have one special trait in common. They strive to adopt a scientific approach to their work - so they don't make claims about Oracle's performance unless they can construct a reproducible test case; they don't believe any claims about Oracle's performance unless the claim is backed by a well-argued proof.
Oracle is complex, subtle and continually evolving environment. The members of the OakTable Network aim to keep pace with it, continually enhancing their tests and understanding so that the information they disseminate is always justified, correct and up to date.
Since the initial seminar meetings, various other individuals who have demonstrated a similar capacity for designing, executing and publishing investigative tests into the behaviour of Oracle have been invited to become associates of the network. These include Peter Sharman, Kyle Hailey, Tim Gorman and others. (The complete list of members can be found here).
Membership is by invitation, but it is almost mandatory to have survived at least one all-night post-conference technical session with a subset of the network; ideally of an oak table in the dining room of a farmhouse in Malov, Denmark.