As Published In September/October 2005

Shaping Institutions
By Blair Campbell

From the ivory tower to the U.S. Department of Defense, three peers find ways to do things better.

John Spencer

Peer Specs Company: University Health Network, one of the leading teaching hospitals in Canada Job Title/Description: Senior technical specialist, handling DBA responsibilities including production support, backup/recovery, system and instance monitoring, and capacity planning Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada Length of Time Using Oracle Products: 10 years Oracle Ace

How did you get started in IT? While I was working at a large trust company in the pension services division, my job was doing performance measurement on money managers. The company created a software package that enabled what-if analysis on the accounting implications of differing investment strategies and various changes to actuarial assumptions in the pension plan. Because I had a background on the investment side and some accounting knowledge, I got to join the team developing this application, initially doing client setup and QA testing. As the original developers left, I was forced to start reading the code to identify the causes of errors in the QA tests. I moved on to do a major rewrite of the accounting piece, and I've been in IT ever since.

What's your favorite tool or technique on the job? One technique I'm growing increasingly fond of is the use of analytic functions to replace SELECT MAX(column) subqueries when trying to find the currently effective record.

If you could change a feature of Oracle Database, what would it be? I'd like to see better error reporting from within an exception handler in PL/SQL.

Connie Adams
Tell us more about your work as a consultant for the U.S. government. I've personally provided services for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Army National Guard, Office

Peer Specs Company: Advanced Software Resources, a Santa Clara, California-based provider of software development for space and electronic systems control, imagery exploitation, and signal processing Job Title/Description: Manager of IT department; consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense Location: Linthicum, Maryland Length of Time Using Oracle Products: Eight years

of the Secretary of Defense, National Imagery Mapping Agency, and Department of Defense. One of my most recent contributions has been to develop a PKI authentication process that is used with Oracle's ADF UIX framework. The process is now being used with other J2EE applications that were developed using Oracle ADF UIX.

What advice do you have about how to get into Web and database development? The most common question I get is, "How do I break into the field when I don't have a technical degree?" My advice has been to volunteer in an office where you'd like to work. For instance, in the development shop, volunteer to help with testing applications.

What technology has most changed your life? I've developed applications ranging from COBOL to Java to Oracle ADF UIX. The language that's had the most significant impact on my technical career has been Java.

Marcelo Ochoa
Tell us about your work developing the database generator for the Apache Cocoon project, the framework that enables generation of XML on the database side. DBPrism Generator for the Apache project was a natural evolution of DBPrism

Peer Specs Company: Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires Job Title/Description: Manager of university system labs Location: Tandil, Buenos Aires, Argentina Length of Time Using Oracle Products: Eight years

Servlet Engine, a J2EE replacement for OWS/OAS/mod_plsql. The main idea was to generate the application XML data running a PL/SQL or Java stored procedure, such as Oracle HTML DB or Oracle Designer WebServer generator. Adding the power of Apache Cocoon allowed for transforming and providing multiple output for the same XML content.

Which features of Oracle Database 10g are you finding most valuable in your work at the university? I'm using a lot of Java inside the database, as well as Oracle XML DB. Now we're ready to upload a new version of DBPrism CMS, built on top of all the new features of Oracle XML DB.

What's your favorite thing outside of work? I love to share my free time with friends and family, making open-fire barbeques—which in Argentina we call asado al asador.