As Published In May/June 2004

Relaxing, Reporting, and Roving
By Blair Campbell

DBAs practice Yoga Nidra, discuss Oracle 10g, and take a long walk in the New Forest.

Gopi Kolluru

Peer Specs Company: Mycom International, a telecommunications company Job Title/Description: Oracle DBA/Value-Added Services Group team leader, responsible for monitoring, maintaining, and supporting various telecom-related databases in the areas of short messaging, intelligent network applications, and network management systems Location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Oracle Credentials: Oracle-certified DBA (Oracle8i, Oracle9i) with six years of experience using Oracle products

How did you get started in IT? I'd always had a dream of being an enterprise resource planning specialist in the area of databases, but I actually started my career in cost auditing, after earning my degree from the Institute of Costs & Works Accountants in India. To pursue both simultaneously, I did IT training in the areas of information and systems management and then went on to earn my Oracle DBA certifications.

Describe the current state of the technology industry in Kuala Lumpur. It's in a very progressive state. Malaysia is now witnessing new mobile technology initiatives such as video streaming and mobile messaging systems, and we're seeing various global challenges arising from convergence of diverse technologies such as multimedia, digital signatures, smart cards, and high-speed communications.

What's your favorite thing to do that doesn't involve work? I use my free time to visit temples with my wife and to practice Yoga Nidra meditation—a great way of relieving stress.

Rab Nawaz
If you could change a feature of Oracle Database, what would it be? I would make the DELETE statement more powerful, thus instead of deleting all rows, particular fields of data might also be deleted.

Additionally, if you add a column to a table, you can't add data to it at the same time; you have to later update those particular fields to upload data into them. I'd like to see a new feature in the ALTER TABLE statement so that

Peer Specs Company: Bahrain Defense Forces Job Title/Description: Systems analyst, responsible for database design and development, software testing and implementation, and technical support Location: Riffa, Kingdom of Bahrain Length of Time Using Oracle Products: Six years

data can be loaded into the new fields simultaneously, i.e. by fetching data from other table fields by using the SELECT clause.

What technology has most changed your life? During my studies at International Islamic University, Islamabad, I really took a keen interest in databases, and that marked a great change in my life. Throughout my career, I've developed many applications using different versions of Oracle Forms and Oracle Reports, and I've also been involved in database administration activities including installation, performance tuning, security control, and data loading.

Tell us about the new features of Oracle Database 10g that you find valuable. The new CPU+I/O cost model enhances the query performance by almost 50 percent, compared to earlier releases of Oracle Database. Other features, such as Real Application Clusters, Automatic Storage Management, transportable tablespaces, LDAP and Oracle Internet Directory for centralizing the security for distributed enterprise, and Oracle label security for rows and columns, have really impressed me a lot.

John Hollings
Tell us about your work on a fire call-handling product for

Peer Specs Company: Just completed a project at Motorola-owned Printrak; now beginning a project at Southampton University Job Title/Description: DBA team leader at Printrak, doing database development and support of a Printrak/Motorola emergency fire call-handling product that has been installed in five major cities in the United Kingdom Location: Christchurch, United Kingdom Length of time using Oracle products: More than eight years

Printrak/Motorola. My role involved providing database development and DBA support for an emergency call-handling system for fire brigades in the U.K. and around the world. My last project was with the London Fire Brigade, whose system should go live sometime this year. The product utilized a number of Oracle features such as multimaster replication to provide a three-site failover, which made upgrades interesting.

How are you using wireless technologies today? I have a wireless network at home, which has meant no nasty do-it-yourself fitting of network connections—and it allows me to be in the garden on those rare sunny days in the U.K.

What's your favorite thing to do that doesn't involve work? Taking a moderately long walk with our Irish Setter to a pub in the New Forest.