January/February 2011
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Job title/description: Consultant, responsible primarily for metadata development Location: Tampa, Florida Length of time using Oracle products: More than 8 years Oracle ACE ![]() |
What advice do you have about how to get into application development? Download software and start playing with it. This is one of my absolute favorite things about Oracle: the ability to download enterprise-class software and use it on your own machine.
How are you using social media in your work today? Thanks to Twitter and my blog, I’ve been able to have technical conversations with some industry heavyweights: Cary Millsap, Christian Berg, Alex Gorbachev, Eddie Awad, Chen Shapira, Jake Kuramoto, Matt Topper, Lewis Cunningham, John Scott, Dimitri Gielis . . . I could go on and on. I encourage other Oracle people to add these tools to their repertoire.
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Job title/description: CEO and founder, responsible for business development and research and serving as lead consultant on Oracle Database and Oracle security projects Location: Tel Aviv, Israel Length of time using Oracle products: 8 years Oracle ACE Director ![]() |
Which new features in Oracle Database are you currently finding most valuable? One feature I find highly valuable is Oracle Database Vault. Until now, strong users such as DBAs and those with a SELECT ANY TABLE role had no limitations to seeing all the data inside the database. Oracle Database Vault introduced a new security admin feature that can prevent other users—even those in a DBA role—from seeing sensitive data and manipulating it or its base objects. Now organizations can safely protect sensitive data from strong users without compromising their ability to perform their jobs.
How are you using cloud computing in your work today? We’re using Google apps for our central mail and calendar system, and we’re using cloud-based applications for customer relationship management and time sheets.
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Job title/description: Principal consultant and founder, responsible for designing architectures and troubleshooting as necessary Location: Sherborne, Dorset, England Length of time using Oracle products: 16 years |
Which new features in Oracle Fusion Middleware are you finding most valuable? A recent discovery has been Oracle JRockit’s new Flight Recorder tool. It’s a circular diagnostics buffer, which in the event of a serious JVM [Java Virtual Machine] problem allows you to replay recent method calls and help diagnose what went wrong.
If you were going to the International Space Station for six months and could only take one Oracle reference book, what would it be? As a bit of an Oracle polymath, I’d want to cover all bases. So I’d take e-books, including Professional Oracle WebLogic Server [Wrox, 2009], Oracle JRockit: The Definitive Guide [Packt Publishing, 2010], Oracle Fusion Developer Guide [McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, 2009], and Pro Oracle Database 11g RAC on Linux [Apress, 2010].
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