Efficiency Experts
In the lab and in the field, these peers focus on getting the job done quickly and well.
KAI YU
ROEL HARTMAN
ANTONIO JOSE RODRIGUES NETO
Company: Dell Inc.
Job title/description: Senior system engineer,
Oracle Solutions Engineering Lab, responsible for
architecting, implementing, and publishing Oracle
engineering solutions based on Dell Inc. platforms
Location: Austin, Texas
Length of time using Oracle products:
15 years
Which new features of Oracle technologies
are you currently finding most valuable?
Oracle clustering technology such as Oracle
Real Application Clusters 11 g Release 2 and
Oracle virtualization technology such as
Oracle VM. These technologies complement
each other to provide a great enterprise
grid infrastructure with more flexibility and
greater efficiency.
What would you like to see Oracle, as a
company, do more of Oracle brings a lot
of great technologies to the IT industry. I’d
just like to see more efforts on integrating
these products—for example, integration
of applications and middleware with some
features of the database, virtualization
technologies, and the grid infrastructure.
When I attended the Oracle E-Business Suite
Grid Customer Advisory Board briefings at
COLLABORATE 10, I was very happy to learn
that Oracle is working on this area.
What green practices do you use in your
work? We’ve done a lot of research and
engineering work on energy efficiency.
We’re also using the grid to promote
resource sharing and reduce servers and
storage, which leads to a great reduction of
energy usage in datacenters.
Company: Logica, a business and technology
service company
Job title/description: Technical lead architect,
participating in presales and sales activities for
Oracle projects and analyzing solutions
Location: Arnhem, the Netherlands
Length of time using Oracle products: More
than 20 years
What is your favorite tool or technique on
the job? At this time, it’s definitely Oracle
Application Express—which is, in my humble
opinion, the best thing since sliced bread.
In all my years using Oracle tools, I’ve never
encountered a development environment
that’s so intuitive and easy to use. The
productivity is simply unbeatable—and
with Release 4.0, the productivity will even
increase, especially when building more Web
2.0–like applications.
What advice do you have for those just
getting into software architecture? Always
start with a good data model! That is the
foundation for every decent application.
If your data model has flaws, you’ll need
a lot of code to overcome that—and you’ll
always fail.
Which new features of Oracle Database are
you currently finding most valuable? I really
love the Edition-Based Redefinition feature
in Oracle Database 11 g Release 2. Since the
whole economy is becoming more and more
global, 24/7 availability is becoming a basic
requirement. We needed a feature to avoid
planned downtime due to an application
upgrade, and Edition-Based Redefinition fills
that gap.
Company: NetApp
Job title: Architect in the NetApp Customer
Proof of Concepts Labs
Location: Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
Length of time using Oracle products: More
than 10 years
What technology has most changed your
life? I’d say technological theorems—in
particular Little’s Law, Moore’s Law, and
Metcalfe’s Law—have changed my life
more than technologies. These laws caused
such a big revolution, and without them,
we wouldn’t have the technologies we have
today. They’re responsible for everything
from the internet to faster processors.
What advice do you have for those
just getting into Web and database
development? All technology today needs
to be deployed and architected with a
focus on three important pillars: the cloud,
virtualization, and efficiency. The world is
changing, technology is changing, and we
need to be prepared for architecting and
deploying solutions to match and address a
future where the volume of data produced is
huge—and service-level agreements will be
more and more aggressive.
If you were going to the International Space
Station for six months and could only
take one I T reference book, what would
it be? My favorite is The Art of Computer
Systems Performance Analysis: Techniques
for Experimental Design, Measurement,
Simulation, and Modeling, by R.K. Jain [Wiley,
1991]. It’s basically a performance bible. W
