I want to wrap this saga with something honest rather than conclusive.
I posted ideas to the Oracle Community in 2016. Two of them — GROUP BY OTHERS and Oracle Tagging for Objects — bear a striking resemblance to features shipped in Oracle 23ai eight years later: GROUP BY ALL and the ANNOTATIONS clause. The syntax is nearly identical. The motivation is the same. The use cases I described are the exact use cases Oracle used in their documentation.
I sent an email to Oracle in August 2025 asking for credit in the documentation. A small request. Being acknowledged as the person who suggested a feature that’s now documented in Oracle’s official manuals would be meaningful.
I’m not writing this as an accusation. I’m writing it because I think the community deserves to know how the relationship between feedback and implementation works – or doesn’t. Thousands of developers, DBAs, and architects contribute ideas to vendor forums every year. Most go nowhere. A few get implemented. Rarely are contributors thanked.
If your idea becomes a product feature, you may never know. If it does, the credit usually stays internal.
I think that should change. Not through legal mechanisms – these are ideas, not patents – but through culture. It costs nothing to say “this idea came from community feedback, including a 2016 post by Matheus Boesing.” Nothing except the will to do it.
The Oracle community has given Oracle an enormous amount over the years: bug reports, feature requests, presentations, blog posts, conference sessions. A little acknowledgment goes a long way.
