India 2001

Philosophy

| The right tool for the right job. | At a recent Chicago Oracle Users Group (COUG) meeting I was chatting with another attendee and they were surprised when I mentioned a few of my interests outside of Oracle (like MySQL). “Doesn’t that conflict with your job?” Not at all!

If I had to choose the most important axiom regarding how I do business then this would probably be it. It extends from the highest to the lowest levels; whether you’re choosing a database product or writing a query you need to know the tools at your disposal and choose the best one. And always remember that the biggest or most expensive choice is not always the best!

Bio

| Leaving no stone unturned. | Gifted in maths and music, I discovered very early that I had a natural aptitude for programming and first started writing my own programs (games) with GWBasic on an 8088 while still in middle school. With a personality that can’t leave any stone unturned, while a freshman in high school I reverse engineered a bunch of the x86 instruction set and wrote my first program directly in machine language… it took about six pages of notebook paper and simply displayed the numbers 1 through 10 on the screen.

Before long, I found my first job; a local small business (8 employees) which contracted with General Motors to tune CNCs hired me at minimum wage to put together a program that would interface with a CNC over a fiberoptic cable using GE Fanuc’s software libraries. I recently spoke with the guy who owns the business and to my best knowledge there’s still a plant which is running my software to upload and download part programs. (Which could mean my programs were brilliant or could explain why GM has been struggling lately… <g>)

I became interested in really studying Oracle and RAC internals around the end of the dot-com bubble. I immediately enjoyed its unique capabilities and challenges, reading the 9i concepts manual from cover to cover within months of discovering it. I had previously been focused on Linux system administration but quickly added DBA responsibilities. I subsequently became the technical lead on our 10g RAC implementation and took charge of all migrations from the old 8i database. Furthermore, I became the OS and RAC specialist for their implementation of Oracle Applications on 9i RAC/Linux which afforded me the opportunity to submit a bugfix for the open source OCFS version 1 (my code was included verbatim in release 1.0.12). That opened the door for my next job as an engineer for GE Healthcare’s Oracle-based Radiology product. At GE one of my biggest projects was to lead the design and implementation of a fully automated upgrade from Oracle 7.3.4 to Oracle 10g which included a major solaris upgrade (to support 10g).

Today I live in Chicago and consult throughout the United States. I’m thoroughly enjoying the opportunity to get paid for working with technology that I love; I truly consider it a privilege that few people have.