A Knight's Tale

By Blair Campbell

Oracle University educator teaches the future while reliving the past.

It's no surprise that Greg Gagnon, one of Oracle University's star instructors, has received numerous titles and honors over the course of his career. Promoted to principal instructor within months of joining Oracle in 2000 and senior principal instructor the following year, he was named the Java/Web Faculty Instructor of the Year in 2002. Oh, and by the way—he also happens to be a viscount, a knight, and a former prince of Drachenwald.

If those last three don't sound like titles typical of a technology instructor, that's because they're honors bestowed by the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), a medieval-reenactment group that Gagnon, 40, joined while serving as a U.S. military-police officer in Germany in 1985. It's a hobby through which he's enjoyed travel throughout Europe, and it's how he met his wife, who is also a member. As for ruling Drachenwald (translation: "dragon's forest"), Gagnon achieved his princedom by emerging victorious from the SCA's Coronet Tournament—or, as he puts it, "hitting everybody else with a stick better than they hit me."

Thankfully, that's not the approach he employs at Oracle University (OU), where he's lead instructor for the Oracle9i Application Server (Oracle9iAS) Administration curriculum. He also teaches database-administration courses, helps train new faculty members, and assists with writing certification exams.

"The teaching is the easy part," says Gagnon. "Once I know the material, I can stand up and teach anything without too much difficulty."

A typical day—whether he's on the road in one of the 30-odd U.S. cities where OU courses are held or at home in Houston, Texas—finds Gagnon at an Oracle Education center by 8:00 a.m., when the students arrive. He teaches until about 5:00 p.m. and often spends the evening sorting through e-mail to see whether any technological developments or security alerts might change the way he's conducting his current class.

"My number-one capability is to be able to learn something quickly, figure out what makes it work, and then turn around and share that information in a lucid fashion," he says. It's a skill he's been honing for a while now—Gagnon has been teaching adult-education classes since he was 17, when he joined the military. His introduction to IT work came in Germany in the early 1990s, when he was chosen to head up information-systems security for his battalion.

A few years later, he translated his newfound tech savvy into a job as a network administrator for a small Houston-based company selling data. Gagnon's job included the installation of Oracle databases, and when he learned that OU was seeking an instructor with a strong network and Web background, he jumped at the opportunity.

In addition to his time in the classroom, Gagnon has a significant hand in reviewing OU curriculum. He's pleased with the unprecedented level of instructor involvement in designing the curriculum for Oracle9i Application Server Release 2 (9.0.4) and says he's very excited about the new release's added functionality—including dramatically increased reliability, better integration, and more administrative flexibility.

"As the functionality gets richer, as more and more things are merged into the product set, all of that stuff is leading to a rapid rate of change," says Gagnon. He adds, "This is the place to be." OU is also the place to be, he says, for an increasing number of self-sponsoring technologists seeking Oracle training—a departure from OU's traditional business with companies that pay to train their employees.

The reason for the trend appears to be faith in Oracle technology. "With the perception that Oracle is a solid skill set that will continue to be valued for the foreseeable future," says Gagnon, "I see more and more people coming to the certification classes on their own time, to try to break into a job market with a future."