As Published In November/December 2004

Prizes, Performance, and Privacy
By Blair Campbell

Three DBAs share their raves about New York City, Steven Feuerstein, and Oracle Database 10g.

Mukesh Agrawal

Peer Specs Company: DSL Software, an IT services company with a focus on banking and finance Job Title/Description: Senior Oracle DBA, responsible for handling and maintaining 3TB Oracle databases for Deutsche Bank Location: Bangalore, India; currently working in New York, New York Oracle Credentials: Oracle-certified DBA (Oracle8, Oracle8i, Oracle9i) with seven years of experience using Oracle products

What's your favorite tool or technique on the job? Years ago, when I was working with Oracle7, it was hard to take backups without a third-party tool—especially for raw-device data files. Now, with RMAN, you just fire a single command and you're done with the backups—as well as recovery, if required.

Your last project involved handling big telecom databases for Hughes Telecom in Mumbai, India. How are you liking life in New York, as compared with Mumbai? Like Mumbai, New York is very crowded, but there's so much technology here—and, contrary to its reputation, so many friendly people. I love that you can easily stay up late and roam around just people-watching.

What's your favorite thing to do that doesn't involve work? Back in my university days, I sang classical songs for our annual school performance, and I also learned to play the synthesizer. I still play in my free time, and I now love listening to classical songs performed by singers like the late Kishore Kumar.

Jørn Hansen

Peer Specs Company: Mærsk Data, a provider of IT services Job Title/Description: System architect in the Food and Agro division Location: Aarhus, Denmark Length of Time Using Oracle Products: 15 years

Tell us about your database project for the Ministry of Food, Agriculture, and Fisheries and the Danish Cattle Association. The European Union has regulations about how much money goes into its different programs. Our database is used to ensure that the Ministry of Food, Agriculture, and Fisheries gives the right grants to the right farmers. The Danish Cattle Association is interested in the same data, and by next year we hope to have two databases running with replication of the different data sets between them.

How did you develop these databases? We started building them from scratch, so we've been using new techniques—partly inspired by Steven Feuerstein's Oracle Magazine articles about data encapsulation. Now we're using Oracle8, but we're talking about moving to either Oracle9i or Oracle Database 10g to take advantage of how much easier replication and streaming have become.

What advice do you have about getting into Web and database development? There's been a lot of recent focus on Java, but it's important to first get a grip on the basic database concepts and PL/SQL. Feuerstein's PL/SQL book, Oracle PL/SQL Developer [O'Reilly & Associates, third edition, 2002], would be a good starting point.

Arun Sinha

Peer Specs Company: Acrodex Job Title: Consultant, responsible for database application design, development, support, and performance tuning Location: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Oracle Credentials: Oracle-certified internet application developer (Oracle8i) with 14 years of experience using Oracle products

How did you get started in IT? As a young boy I fancied working with computers, but I didn't know where to begin. I eventually undertook a bachelor's degree course in computer science and engineering at Jadavpur University in India and went on to earn a master's degree. Afterward I worked for a few leading companies and got really interested in Oracle technology. I taught myself PL/SQL, Forms, and Reports by reading manuals, and I eventually took Oracle University advanced courses.

If you could add a feature to Oracle Database, what would it be? I would build the audit-trailing feature into the database tables as pseudo-columns.

What new features of Oracle Database 10g do you find most valuable? From a developer's perspective, I welcome new support for POSIX regular expression in the database for textual pattern matching. In addition to being a powerful search tool, you can also put it as a check constraint on the database column, enabling a higher level of data integrity. Another exciting new feature is HTML DB, which provides a framework for rapidly building simple database-centric Web-based user interfaces.