COMMUNITY: Peer-to-Peer

As Published In May/June 2011

Database Centric

Three peers keep it simple, like surprises, and find the constant in a sea of change.  

Liron Amitzi

Peer Specs Company: Brillix, a database consulting company   Job title/description: Vice president, professional services, responsible for all consulting projects and serving as senior Oracle Database consultant specializing in infrastructure and performance Location: Givat Shmuel, Israel Length of time using Oracle products: 12 years Oracle ACE

Which new feature in Oracle Database are you currently finding most valuable? Oracle Database 11g delivers many interesting features, including Oracle Real Application Testing. This feature gives us the ability to test things thoroughly and perform an upgrade or make a change in the production environment without the apprehension we had before.

What would you like to see Oracle, as a company, do more of? Making applications more user friendly and simple is very important in our world of complex systems. Oracle Database 10g marked great improvement in this area, providing database control and sophisticated autotuning and management capabilities. This trend continued in Oracle Database 11g Releases 1 and 2, and I hope we’ll see more of this in the future.

Toon Koppelaars

Peer Specs Company: RuleGen, a database consulting and tools company   Job title/description: Founder/owner, serving as technical architect and lead developer of the RuleGen framework, which aids in implementing data integrity constraints inside Oracle Database Location: Zaltbommel, the Netherlands Length of time using Oracle products: 24 years Oracle ACE Director

What advice do you have about how to get into database development? My advice would be to start at the bottom: learn the database first and foremost. Oracle Database 11g has an enormous wealth of functionality. More often than not, you can implement application functionality inside the database, where it will require fewer lines of code—and will perform an order of magnitude better—than in any other tier stacked on top of the database.

What technology has most changed your life? That would have to be Oracle Database, since I’ve been surfing its wave for the past 24 years now. I recall Larry Ellison’s catchphrase at an Oracle OpenWorld a decade or so ago: “Change is the only constant.” As true as that is, Oracle Database has been my only constant in trying to survive all the other changes and paradigm shifts in the industry.
 

Fernando Martin Garcia

Peer Specs Company: Universidad Argentina de la Empresa, a private university   Job title/description: Independent Oracle Database instructor and senior Oracle DBA, leading a team of DBAs and system administrators in installing, supporting, and maintaining university servers and databases Location: Berazategui, Argentina Length of time using Oracle products: 15 years Oracle ACE

Which new feature in Oracle Database are you currently finding most valuable? Flashback Data Archive. With this feature, you no longer need to build the intelligence to maintain historical data in your application. Oracle Database does it for you, and it’s really simple to query your historical information using the AS OF clause.

How are you using social media in your work? I’m the founder of Comunidad Oracle Hispana, a community for Latin American and Spanish professionals who work with Oracle technologies and speak Spanish. The community has more than 2,000 members, and it’s an excellent tool not only for solving problems but also for making good friends.