COMMUNITY: Peer-to-Peer

As Published In July/August 2011

On Grids and Groups

Three peers navigate trends in virtualization, database monitoring, and social media.  

Bob Mycroft

Peer Specs Company: Capgemini, an IT services and business consultancy company   Job title: Senior Oracle DBA, working on the team overseeing Capgemini’s U.K. Environment Agency account Location: Leeds, England Oracle credentials: Oracle Certified Professional (Oracle8i Database through Oracle Database 10g) and Oracle Certified Expert (Oracle Real Application Clusters 10g), with 15 years of experience using Oracle products Oracle ACE

Any other products or features currently piquing your interest? Oracle VM. It’s really the only truly supported virtualization platform for Oracle products. The ability for us to potentially use Oracle technologies for the whole stack and then to virtualize the hardware itself is seriously attractive, as it means a single vendor for support.

If you were going to the International Space Station for six months and could only take one Oracle reference book, what would it be? The Art and Science of Oracle Performance Tuning, by Christopher Lawson [Apress, 2003]. It’s quite an old book now, but I really like the way Lawson approaches the subject.

Julian Dontcheff

Peer Specs Company: Accenture, a management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company   Job title/description: Head of database management, overseeing a global team of DBAs Location: Helsinki, Finland Oracle credentials: Oracle Certified Master, Oracle Certified Professional (Oracle8i Database through Oracle Database 11g), and Oracle Certified Professional Developer (Oracle Forms 6, Oracle Forms 6i), with 23 years of experience using Oracle products Oracle ACE Director

What advice do you have about how to get into database and application development? Attend an Oracle University [OU] class! It’s the best place to get Oracle knowledge. I’ve taken dozens of OU classes, always in the classroom, and I used them to prepare for my Oracle certification exams. OU is the place where information, study materials, and training are all provided from the very heart of Oracle. And I’ve always admired the enthusiasm and dedication of Oracle trainers.

What technology has most changed your life? The TV set and the computer. Both equally—and almost all for the better.
 

Sheeri K. Cabral

Peer Specs Company: PalominoDB, a remote database management company   Job title/description: Community manager and DBA, working in the field to handle all database tasks for PalominoDB clients Location: Boston, Massachusetts Oracle credentials: MySQL 4.0 Core certified and Oracle Certified Professional DBA (MySQL 5.0), with 10 years of experience using Oracle products Oracle ACE Director

What’s your favorite tool or technique on the job? Lately I’m very enamored with mk-query-digest and EXPLAIN to do query reviews of the MySQL general logs. As for query reviews themselves, I find they are extremely helpful in finding queries to optimize before they become a problem in production.

How are you using social media in your work? I’m on LinkedIn and Twitter. I try to keep Facebook personal, although I do participate in MySQL groups and events on Facebook. I have a blog, and I’m also the cohost of OurSQL: The MySQL Database Community Podcast [listen to the show at dev.mysql.com/podcasts.]