I believe that Lewis' contrived test cases mislead and confuse the Oracle community, and the viciousness of the attacks have been likened to the attack on Kathy Sierra, a woman who received unwarranted death threats:

"I have seen many posts in regards to comments made by "Burleson vs Lewis" fanboys that would probably not be much different than those made against Kathy."     

I believe that Lewis' smear campaigns speaks for themselves, and Jonathan Lewis' methods and motives have been questioned within the Oracle community. Here is what Bob Jones said about Lewis' "proof" about a small exception invalidating my work:

"Wow, this guy really has too much time in his hands, or he just hate this Don guy too much.

It is pointless to set _AREA_SIZE when using PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET anyway."

Malice and debunking

Lewis' questionable "proofs" remind me of the "bad science" that software vendors and book authors have used to smear the credibility of their competitors. Let's look at some real-world examples of how bad science debunkers can unfairly defame innocent people.

In "Freakonomics", author Stephen Levitt became famous by applying common sense and social observations to statistical studies, but some people say that the bestselling book "Freakonomics" deliberately mislead and deceived by unfairly debunking the legitimate scientific research of Dr. John Lott.  Levitt is now being sued by Dr. John Lott, (a scholar who worked at Yale and the Wharton school), for falsely being “debunked”.  Professor Lott's web site notes:

"The lawsuit states that the book “damages Lott’s reputation in the eyes of the academic community in which he works, and in the minds of hundreds of thousands of academics, college students, graduate students, and members of the general public who read Freakonomics.”

These smear campaigns also extend into the Oracle world, as noted in the Oracle SAP lawsuit where we see these allegations of unfair smears against Oracle Corporation:

"Beginning in January 2005, SAP sales representatives unleashed a torrent of marketing materials designed to exacerbate and leverage perceived, albeit unfounded, PeopleSoft and JDE customer uncertainty about the prospects for long-term, quality support from Oracle."

FYI, interference with prospective economic advantage is a crime commonly-referred-to as "tortuous interference", a crime where a business competitor intentionally trashes their competition. 

Dishonesty in action

Using a cleaver "word game" deception scheme (if something is 1% wrong, ergo it's ALL wrong), Jonathan Lewis has conducted an organized and malicious attack against me, starting right after he was not paid for an article which he submitted to DBAZine (an online magazine where I was serving as the senior technical editor):

In Lewis’ “undocumented or untested” tirade, he found an exception in an “Oracle Quick Tip” (The Oracle quick tips are a "Factoid-like" condensed summary, having under 300 words).  Lewis would have been justified in saying, “Burleson did not mention an obscure exception, and it works differently with the MTS”.  Instead, Lewis said that my Quick Tip "should never have seen the light of day" and that it was proven “wrong” (BTW, Lewis "proved" me wrong by using a non-standard Oracle features that he did not disclose up-front). 

To make matters worse, Lewis calls himself a "scientist" yet he did not follow the scientific method (whereby scientists must disclose their methodology before presenting conclusions).  He hides his use of an important non-standard setting until well into his report, causing widespread confusion that continues to this day.
 

Do people really believe self-appointed Oracle experts?

In the past, Lewis' smear campaign has had great success in damaging my hard-earned reputation, especially with trusting people who did not understand that an article that was "proven totally wrong" by Jonathan Lewis, was, in-fact, substantially correct:

"Thank you Tom and Jonathan Lewis for exposing these dreadful, dangerous articles for what they are.

The fact of the matter is that Don has published an article with which was incorrect with half-baked assumptions/assertions

Good to see people like you are no longer ignoring people like Don Burleson who most of the time post half truths and totally wrong "technical Information"."

In this Lewis’ attack, Lewis’ says that Oracle does not have multiple log writer processes, despite the fact that the Oracle documentation clearly shows the log writer I/O slaves appearing as “Ixnn” processes when doing a UNIX/Linux “ps ef” command (ps is the abbreviation for the PROCESS Status command). 

July 17, 2007

Remember the movie cliché where the mobster tells a store owner “It would be a shame if something were to happen to your nice little store?”

It’s the old “thinly veiled” threat, a statement meant to instill compliance through fear.  That’s what I see happening here, with this apparent threat by Jonathan Lewis that "he suspects" that this web page is going to “damage me” if it is not removed within two weeks:

“I suspect it will damage you more than it will damage me.

Having written it all down and got it out of your system, you might want to take it down in a few days time”.

Lewis followed-up (below) with a more ominous threat, giving me a "couple of weeks" to think about the wisdom of removing this web page, and to contemplate the damage that "he suspects" will follow if I don't comply with his demand to shut-up about his abuses:

“Don, that’s your choice. But I’m happy to let you have a couple of weeks to think about it.”

So, what is Lewis planning to do me in two weeks? 

It can't be a lawsuit because I'm well within my rights to report on the damage from his smear campaign.  I would welcome a legal action by Lewis (what he did to me is nasty by any standard), but it's his non-legal actions that scare me.