What’s a good way to learn some Oracle internals every day?

Sometimes when an attendee describes me some totally weird problem during a seminar, I am immediately able to answer something like “Hey this looks like a bug related to this Oracle configuration and can be influenced by xyz”.

And then people ask me “How the hell do you know all this stuff?”

Well, I haven’t been bitten by all of these bugs myself, but I have been doing something for many years, almost every day… reading my email!

Oh, and additionally I have configured Metalink to send me daily updates about new/updated notes, forum articles and… bug descriptions!

The last part is very important. Bug descriptions tell you something about new bugs found (and old bugs rediscovered) and sometimes their details tell you an interesting piece or two about Oracle internals related to them.