COMMUNITY: Peer-to-Peer

As Published In
Oracle Magazine
November/December 2010

  

Advice Line

By Blair Campbell

 

Three seasoned technologists on the merits of humility, simplicity, and education  

Hemant K. Chitale

Peer Specs


Company: Standard Chartered Bank, a global financial institution with employees in more than 70 countries
 


Job title/description: Product specialist within the Group Functions Systems Development team, focusing on Oracle Database


Location: Singapore


Oracle credentials: Oracle Certified Professional DBA (Oracle9i Database), with 21 years of experience using Oracle products


Oracle ACE Oracle ACE
What advice do you have about how to get into database development? For a newcomer, even if you have a formal degree in computer science, spend six months to a year interning in various areas of specialization. I did some programming and some hardware configuration before finally identifying my calling. Once you’re in your chosen stream, be attentive to industry trends. I don’t formally “network” in the most frequently used sense of the word—but I do read, share, and interact with others in the community through e-mail lists, Oracle forums, and blog posts. And be humble—you’ll never know everything.

What technology has most changed your life? I have to put out the simple response that you probably hear most often: the internet. Not for its IRCs [Internet Relay Chats] and social networking but for economic, international, business, and technology news; e-mail lists and forums; and the ability to order books from overseas countries online.

What would you like to see Oracle, as a company, do more of? Present more Oracle Technology Days in Southeast Asia—in Singapore particularly!

 

Hector Madrid

Peer Specs


Company: SST Software, a company that manages agricultural imagery data
 


Job title/description: Senior Oracle DBA, responsible for database administration, backup and recovery, performance tuning, software upgrades, and security management


Location: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma


Oracle credentials: Oracle Certified Master DBA and Oracle Certified Professional DBA (Oracle7 through Oracle Database 11g), with more than 20 years of experience using Oracle products


Oracle ACE Oracle ACE
Which new features in Oracle Database are you currently finding most valuable? Oracle Automatic Storage Management and the Volume Manager. Another nice feature is Secure Files, which improves performance, optimizes storage, and provides an additional security layer.

What advice do you have for those just getting into application development? When designing an application, seriously evaluate the amount of intelligence it’s going to manage. This will define the amount of coding, complexity, round-trips to the server, and scalability. And be aware that the application user is different from the big database user.

Tell us about your role with Oracle University (OU) and the value you see in this program. I’ve been a certified OU instructor for more than 15 years, and I really believe that an OU course is the best way to get acquainted with Oracle technology. The courses provide a good balance between theory and practice, and professionals can start being productive the day the course concludes.
 

Dmitri Khanine

Peer Specs


Company: ECM Solutions, an Oracle Universal Content Management consulting company
 


Job title/description: Senior architect, helping clients with their Oracle Universal Content Management implementations and crisis recovery and providing customized training


Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada


Length of time using Oracle products: 15 years


Oracle ACE Oracle ACE
How did you get started in IT? When I was in eighth grade, in 1989, my buddy’s dad built a PC. That machine couldn’t do much more than let you play a couple of primitive games, and it was using a VCR as its tape drive, but it was so cool! We were spending days with that “PC,” and soon enough I learned how to write simple programs.

What’s your favorite tool or technique on the job? Recently I became a fan of code generation. It lets you bump your use of programming languages and tools to a much higher level—almost instantly. It’s metaprogramming, if you will. If the code you’re writing is repetitive and you can’t easily avoid writing it, don’t write it. Generate it!

Which new features of Oracle Fusion Middleware are you currently finding most valuable? We’re migrating our shared Oracle Universal Content Management hosting environment to the Site Studio 10g Release 4 component and its new placeholder architecture, which allows us to simplify sitewide changes and slash maintenance expenses. Previously, a small change to a site could easily result in more than two dozen template modifications. Now there will be only one file to change.

 

 

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