As Published In September/October 2006

Three peers extol the pleasures of reading, both on the job and off.

Jaromir Nemec

Peer Specs Company: T-Mobile, an international cell phone and wireless service provider Job Title/Description: Freelance database consultant, responsible for enterprise integration solutions and the design of the data warehouse Location: Vienna, Austria Length of Time Using Oracle Products: 15 years

If you could change a feature of Oracle Database, what would it be? The SQL profile is a very exciting feature. I'd appreciate the ability to define the profile on a predicate level that could be reused in all statements using this predicate.

Tell us about the paper you wrote and presented at the U.K. Oracle User Group Exhibition & Conference 2005 titled "Are Your Statistics Bad Enough?" You can tell pretty quickly whether your statistics are stale or fresh, but it's difficult to decide if they're appropriate or misleading. In my presentation, I proposed a method that makes it possible to measure the quality of database statistics. It's based on the access and filter predicates used in statements accessing the data. Simply put, it's like a JUnit test for DBAs.

If you were going to the space station for six months, which Oracle reference books would you take? I personally like books by Jonathan Lewis—he wrote Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals [Apress, 2005] and Practical Oracle8i [Addison-Wesley, 2001]. Apart from a lot of useful technical details, they offer guidance on how to think while working with Oracle Database.

Bruno Vroman

How did you get started in IT? I studied mathematics at university and was fond of "pure" math, like algebra and logic. Then I took my first IT course and thought: "This is applied logic! This is what I want to do!" I immediately switched my focus to applied mathematics.

You mention that you'd rather avoid problems than solve them. Tell us more about that philosophy. When something goes wrong with application performance, it's often due to bad practice—for example, requiring the scanning of GBs of data for a "simple" query,

Peer Specs Company: Capgemini, a global consulting, technology, and outsourcing firm Job Title/Description: Senior Oracle DBA, providing help and advice to project teams and developers—with a preference for avoiding problems over solving them Location: Brussels, Belgium Length of Time Using Oracle Products: 13 years

when a slightly different approach would produce the same results at a fraction of the workload. That kind of problem can easily be missed in the developing/testing environment because of small data volume and load—and when the application moves to production, people are disappointed by poor response time. Having a look "upriver" at the way developers work and providing sound advice can save us a lot of annoyance later.

What's your favorite thing to do outside of work? Reading scientific periodicals, novels, and comics. Some of my favorites are Hermann Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund; Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach; Art Spiegelman's Maus; and Jacques Tardi's comic books about World War I.

Jeffrey Hunter
What's your favorite tool or technique on the job? Using Oracle extended SQL trace data for application system and SQL tuning. It's not just a tool for performance tuning—it's unmatched as a tool for understanding the internals of how the Oracle kernel works.

Peer Specs Company: The DBA Zone, a provider of remote managed database administration services Job Title/Description: Senior DBA, responsible for designing and implementing highly available database solutions; ensuring database availability; and application, system, and SQL tuning Location: Butler, Pennsylvania Oracle Credentials: Oracle-certified DBA (Oracle7, Oracle8, Oracle8i, Oracle9i) with 12 years of experience using Oracle products Oracle ACE

Which new features of Oracle Database 10g are you finding most valuable? The new Oracle Automatic Storage Management feature has made it incredibly easy for us to provision and manage storage with both single-instance and Oracle Real Application Clusters deployments.

What advice do you have about getting into Web and database development? Download the latest version of Oracle JDeveloper 10g and get Oracle JDeveloper 10g Handbook [Oracle Press, 2004]. Oracle JDeveloper 10g provides a unique development environment capable of using Oracle-specific frameworks—Oracle Application Development Framework, for example—as well as non-Oracle-specific frameworks.