As Published In November/December 2006

Three ACEs love talking tech—in their blogs and in blog-like musings on OTN.

Avi Abrami
Tell us about the airport management solutions (AIMS) produced by your company. InterSystems has an AIMS, a flight information display system [FIDS], and other related

Peer Specs Company: InterSystems, a provider of airport information management solutions Job Title/Description: Senior software engineer, responsible for developing InterSystems' AIMS product Location: Modi'in, Israel (InterSystems is based in Denver, Colorado) Length of Time Using Oracle Products: 17 years Oracle ACE

products. While our main customers are airports, our software is suitable for any place that displays information on signs—in fact, we're vying to be a technology provider for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Oracle Database drives our FIDS system, and we use OC4J [Oracle Containers for J2EE] as our Web server.

How do you use the internet on the job? I mainly use it to monitor the Java-related forums on Oracle Technology Network (OTN). I don't have a blog, but in a way I use the OTN forums as my blog—someone always asks a question or posts a reply that allows me to provide a code snippet or offer my opinion on something. Actually, my main blog-type message on the forums is, "When all else fails, read the documentation." But I must admit I got that one from my boss.

Syed Jaffar Hussain

What kinds of topics do you discuss on your blog, at www.jaffardba.blogspot.com? I've discussed a few of the tuning problems we've encountered at the bank where I work. For example, we had a 1.7TB Oracle9i database on AIX, which we moved to an HP Superdome. After a successful migration, one of our queries—which was supposed to run for just a few minutes—was taking forever. I realized that the problem was the query_rewrite_enabled parameter—it was set to FALSE on the HP database. So I blogged about the impact of various parameter settings on SQL performance.

Peer Specs Company: Banque Saudi Fransi, a full-service commercial bank and financial services provider Job Title/Description: Senior Oracle DBA, with responsibility for critical bank databases—including core banking, data warehousing, and local share trading databases Location: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Oracle Credential: Oracle-certified DBA (Oracle8i, Oracle9i, Oracle Database 10g), with more than 8 years of experience using Oracle products Oracle ACE

Tell us about your experiences with Oracle University (OU). I've taken several five-day OU courses, and the Oracle Database 10g New Features class in particular was a huge help when I was preparing for my Oracle Database 10g New Features for Administrators exam. The course material offered brief but comprehensive information that really helped me understand the important terminology.

If you were going to the Space Station for six months, which Oracle reference books would you take? I recommend Cary Millsap's Optimizing Oracle Performance [O'Reilly Media, 2003], Tom Kyte's Expert One-on-One [Apress, 2005], and Jonathan Lewis' Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals [Apress, 2005].

Chris Foot
How did you get started in IT? I was hurt in an on-the-job accident while I was working for a construction company, and because I could no longer fulfill my responsibilities in my old profession, I was eligible for a state-sponsored retraining program. The program trained handicapped people for jobs in the computer industry, so I learned COBOL programming. I was ultimately offered a job writing COBOL programs and later moved on to database administration.

Looking forward, what trends do you see in database administration? Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor and the intelligent advisers may not currently be a total replacement for DBA experience and expertise, but sooner or later, they will be. And no, we won't all be out of jobs—we'll just be doing different things. The list of what Oracle Database 10g allows us to do just goes on and on. It took me four blog entries [see www.dbazine.com/blogs/blog-cf/chrisfoot] to cover just a subset of the new features in the latest release.

What's your favorite thing to do that doesn't involve work? I'm a car nut. I currently own a customized 1957 Chevy Bel Air and have done most of the work on it myself.