Database Centric
Three peers keep it simple, like surprises, and find the constant in a sea of change.
LIRON AMITZI
TOON KOPPELAARS
FERNANDO MARTIN GARCIA
Company: Brillix, a database consulting
company
Job title/description: Vice president,
professional services, responsible for all
consulting projects and serving as senior
Oracle Database consultant specializing in
infrastructure and performance
Location: Givat Shmuel, Israel
Length of time using Oracle products:
12 years
What’s your favorite tool or technique on
the job? Definitely tuning. I sometimes find
tuning is like an art. The challenge of analyzing
a complex query or strange system behavior
requires creativity, an open mind, and broad
knowledge in many fields such as system
administration, storage, and development.
Which new feature in Oracle Database are
you currently finding most valuable? Oracle
Database 11 g delivers many interesting
features, including Oracle Real Application
Testing. This feature gives us the ability
to test things thoroughly and perform an
upgrade or make a change in the production
environment without the apprehension we
had before.
What would you like to see Oracle, as a
company, do more of Making applications
more user friendly and simple is very important in our world of complex systems. Oracle
Database 10g marked great improvement
in this area, providing database control and
sophisticated autotuning and management
capabilities. This trend continued in Oracle
Database 11 g Releases 1 and 2, and I hope
we’ll see more of this in the future.
Company: RuleGen, a database consulting and
tools company
Job title/description: Founder/owner, serving
as technical architect and lead developer of the
RuleGen framework, which aids in implementing
data integrity constraints inside Oracle Database
Location: Zaltbommel, the Netherlands
Length of time using Oracle products:
24 years
What’s your favorite tool or technique on the
job? I’m still a sucker for the command-line
SQL*Plus utility—although I’m also adopting
Oracle SQL Developer more and more
nowadays. Both tools offer convenient direct
access to the two most important APIs of the
database: SQL and PL/SQL.
What advice do you have about how to get
into database development? My advice
would be to start at the bottom: learn
the database first and foremost. Oracle
Database 11 g has an enormous wealth of
functionality. More often than not, you can
implement application functionality inside
the database, where it will require fewer
lines of code—and will perform an order of
magnitude better—than in any other tier
stacked on top of the database.
What technology has most changed your
life? That would have to be Oracle Database,
since I’ve been surfing its wave for the past
24 years now. I recall Larry Ellison’s catchphrase at an Oracle Open World a decade
or so ago: “Change is the only constant.” As
true as that is, Oracle Database has been my
only constant in trying to survive all the other
changes and paradigm shifts in the industry.
Company: Universidad Argentina de la Empresa,
a private university
Job title/description: Independent Oracle
Database instructor and senior Oracle
DBA, leading a team of DBAs and system
administrators in installing, supporting, and
maintaining university servers and databases
Location: Berazategui, Argentina
Length of time using Oracle products:
15 years
How did you get started with Oracle
technology? My first contact with an Oracle
database was through SQL*Loader in 1995.
I was part of a migration team at Telefónica
de Argentina that was converting gigabytes
of COBOL files into Oracle tables. I’ve never
left Oracle since. I’m very curious about how
things work, and each and every day the Oracle
Database internals surprise me with something new. That’s why I love this technology.
Which new feature in Oracle Database
are you currently finding most valuable?
Flashback Data Archive. With this feature,
you no longer need to build the intelligence
to maintain historical data in your application. Oracle Database does it for you, and it’s
really simple to query your historical information using the AS OF clause.
How are you using social media in your
work? I’m the founder of Comunidad Oracle
Hispana, a community for Latin American
and Spanish professionals who work with
Oracle technologies and speak Spanish. The
community has more than 2,000 members,
and it’s an excellent tool not only for solving
problems but also for making good friends.
