As Published In March/April 2005

Around the World with Oracle Users
By Blair Campbell

Technologists in Athens, in the forests of Canada, and amid India's breezes

George Syntetas

Peer Specs Company: Singular Software, a division of the Delta Singular Group offering standardized transactional applications Job Title/Description: Oracle DBA, responsible for supporting developers and customers through installation, maintenance, tuning, troubleshooting, and coding Location: Athens, Greece Oracle Credentials: Oracle-certified DBA (Oracle9i, currently pursuing Oracle Database 10g certification) with six years of experience in using Oracle products

What's your favorite tool or technique on the job? When it comes to Oracle, I prefer Oracle Statspack, Quest's Spotlight on Oracle, and Allround Automations' PL/SQL Developer.

You're currently taking Oracle University's Oracle Database 10g New Features for Administrators class. Which new features are you finding most valuable? Most of them are valuable to us here at Singular, but certainly Oracle Data Pump and transportable tablespaces across different platforms look very promising. The Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor, Automatic Workload Repository, and Automatic Shared Memory Management features of Oracle 10g also look interesting.

What's your favorite thing to do that doesn't involve work? I participate in competitive running events, especially marathons, which means that I spend a lot of time training. My last marathon was in November of last year—it was the Classic Marathon in Athens, which many pro runners believe to be the most difficult marathon worldwide. Although I'm not that experienced when it comes to long-distance running, my best time is 4:28. Not bad, and I'm getting better every day.

Bill Galloway

Peer Specs Company: Canadian Forest Products Job Title/Description: Senior analyst, responsible for integration of subledgers and all business processes with Canfor's Oracle Financials General Ledger and Payables applications Location: Vancouver, British Columbia Length of time using Oracle products: Almost 10 years

Tell us more about your role at Canadian Forest Products. I'm an accountant, and accounting skills are very useful for working in an IT department on financial systems. I look for opportunities to improve the business process, streamline it, and prevent errors. Often the road to better productivity is not in accomplishing very difficult tasks but in performing an obvious process meticulously and well, driving the costs down over time.

What advice do you have about getting into Web and database development? You have to have room to play and make mistakes. I taught COBOL for a few years, and students used to ask how I was able to debug their programs over the phone. It was because I'd already made every possible mistake in COBOL.

You mention that you've taken Oracle University classes. What led you to do this? I needed to learn about Oracle Assets quickly. Sometimes it isn't enough to just learn how to use the Depreciation button. You need to understand how the system architects have put together the whole business process. Taking a class helped a lot with that.

Raghuram Bharatwaj C

Peer Specs Company: Hexaware Technologies, a provider of IT solutions and process outsourcing services Job Title/Description: Systems analyst, consulting on customer projects involving Java, J2EE, and performance management Location: Chennai, India Length of time using Oracle products: More than five years

If you could add a feature to or change a feature of Oracle Database, what would it be? Clustering, load balancing (high availability), and additional features for storing data in XML.

How did you get started in IT? We like to joke locally that Chennai has three seasons: hot, hotter, and hottest. I wanted to work in a "cool" environment in every respect, and with IT being a new-economy industry, I anticipated that it would take me to interesting places, such as the U.S. and Germany. I tried my hand at some programming courses, and it all just clicked. Lots of competition, better quality of work, and challenging projects have all led me to stay in Chennai longer than I expected.

What technology has most changed your life? J2EE has given me a strong perspective on enterprise applications and their related challenges. Also, although I'm not yet a user of wireless technologies, I'm looking forward to using them to capitalize on the capabilities of enterprise applications and to accelerate the flow of information to consumers. In particular, I see radio frequency identification coming up in a very big way.