Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table

Pete Finnigan is a world-renowned expert in the area of Oracle security providing consultancy, design expertise, security audits, and trainings, all in the area of Oracle security. Pete is a member of the OakTable Network. He has spoken regularly all over the world at various conferences such as UKOUG, PSOUG, BlackHat, and Risk. Pete is a published author on Oracle security, and researches and writes about the subject regularly. Pete also runs his website, www.petefinnigan.com, dedicated to Oracle security providing help and free tools to the community.

Alex Gorbachev is a respected figure in the Oracle world, and a sought-after leader and speaker at Oracle conferences around the globe. He is an OakTable Network member, and has been recognized as an Oracle ACE Director for his contributions to the community and unmatched set of skills. He is the founder of the Battle Against Any Guess movement promoting scientific troubleshooting techniques. Alex has worked for The Pythian Group in several roles. He began by leading a team of database experts in Ottawa. He then moved to Australia to build the company's presence in the East Asia Pacific region. Now he is back in Ottawa as The Pythian Group's chief technology officer. In all his work, Alex continues to work towards bridging the gap between business and technology. The search for the perfect fit between technology, engineering talents, and business process is what keeps him up at night.

Tim Gorman began his information technology career in 1984 as a C programmer on UNIX and VMS systems, working on medical and financial systems as an application developer, systems programmer, and systems administrator. He joined Oracle Corporation in 1990 as a consultant, then became an independent consultant in 1998, and has worked for SageLogix since 2000. Gorman is the coauthor of Essential Oracle8i Data Warehousing and Oracle8 Data Warehousing. He specializes in performance tuning applications, databases, and systems, as well as data warehouse design and implementation, backup and recovery, architecture and infrastructure, and database administration. Gorman still considers himself a pretty good coder, although the market for C programs has dried up somewhat lately.

Charles Hooper is the information technology manager and an Oracle database administrator at K&M Machine-Fabricating, Inc., where he has been employed since 2000. His role in the company extends well beyond Oracle database administration responsibilities, providing opportunities for database performance tuning, network administration, programming, hardware/software troubleshooting, mentoring fellow IT staff, and end-user training for the Infor Visual Enterprise ERP system as well as other custom developed applications. Charles is well known among the user community of Infor Visual Enterprise due to his years of participation in various user forums answering technical questions, providing the only Oracle presentation at Infor's 2008 user's conference, and providing presentations to regional user groups. Prior to joining K&M, he was a computer/technology instructor and Novell Netware administrator. He holds a bachelor of science degree in mathematics and computer science. Much has changed in the computer industry since his first home computer in 1981, which offered 5KB of memory, a surprisingly small amount today as manufacturers offer home computers with as much as 24GB of memory.

Jonathan Lewis has been working in the information technology industry for nearly 25 years, and has been using the Oracle relational database management system for more than 20. For the past 16 years, he has worked as a freelance consultant, often spending only one or two days at a time with any client to address critical performance problems. He also advises on design and implementation problems, and on how to make best use of the most appropriate Oracle features for a given project. Jonathan is also renowned throughout the world for his tutorials and seminars about the Oracle database engine and how to make best use of it. Having visited 42 countries at last count, his exceptional ability has earned him an O1 visa from the United States, allowing him to do consultancy and lecture work there. Jonathan has written two books about Oracle (Practical Oracle8i, Addison-Wesley, 2000; Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals, Apress, 2005), and has contributed to two others (Oracle Insights, Apress, 2004; Oracle Database 10g New Features, Oracle Press, 2004). He also writes regularly for the UKOUG magazine, and occasionally for other publications around the world. In the limited amount of time he has leftover, Jonathan also publishes high-tech Oracle articles on his blog at jonathanlewis.wordpress.com.

Niall Litchfield is a DBA of 15 years standing, with extensive experience of running databases on various x86(64) platforms, and with a particular bias towards Microsoft Windows. Niall began professional life as a ""bean-counter"" for KPMG, consequently he is a DBA who respects auditors, not least because they have to stand in unheated warehouses in the middle of winter watching other people count things, something he never wants to do again. His dad was a real engineer crafting genuinely useful objects with fine tolerances and that, coupled with an early experience in which he showed that the two competing macro-economic theories of the time both explained actual behavior equally well, and that neither explained it adequately, rather explains his evidence based approach to databases in general and performance tuning in particular.

Robyn Sands is a software engineer for Cisco Systems, where she designs and develops embedded Oracle database products for Cisco customers. She has been working with Oracle since 1996, and has extensive experience in application development, large system implementations, and performance measurement. Robyn began her career in industrial and quality engineering, and has combined her prior education and experience with her love of data by searching for new ways to build database systems with consistent performance and minimal maintenance requirements. She is a member of the OakTable Network and co-author of two books on Oracle: Expert Oracle Practices and Pro Oracle SQL. Robyn occasionally posts random blog entries at http://adhdocddba.blogspot.com.

Jože Senegačnik has more than 20 years of experience in working with Oracle products. He began in 1988 with Oracle database version 4 while working for the city of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he had charge over the city's municipal and geographic information systems. From 1993 to 2003, he worked in developing GIS systems for the Surveying and Mapping Authority of the Republic of Slovenia, and in the development of applications for other governmental institutions, all based on the Oracle database. More recently, he has specialized in performance optimization, having developed his own toolset for monitoring performance and analyzing trace files. Jože is an internationally-recognized speaker, and a member of the highly respected OakTable Network. He is a regular speaker at user-group conferences, especially those put on by the Slovenian Oracle Users Group (SIOUG), the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), and the United Kingdom Oracle Users Group (UKOUG). He also speaks routinely at the Hotsos Symposium and Oracle Open World. In addition to sharing his knowledge through conference talks, Jože conducts technical seminars organized either by Oracle University or himself. He was awarded Oracle ACE membership for his long record of positive contributions to the Oracle community.

Riyaj Shamsudeen is an industry-recognized RAC expert and performance tuning specialist with 19+ years of experience in implementing, using, and tuning RAC and Oracle products. He is an Oracle ACE Director and proud member of the OakTable network. Riyaj has co-authored many books about Oracle Database. He is an active blogger (at http://orainternals.wordpress.com) and frequent international speaker in major conferences such as UKOUG, HOTSOS, Open World, and RMOUG.

Jeremiah Wilton has worked with Oracle technology since 1994. His main claim to fame is having been Amazon.com's first database administrator, back in the pre-IPO days. For seven years, he helped Amazon.com survive exponential scaling, and a wide variety of nearly-catastrophic technology failures. Jeremiah owned and ran ORA-600 Consulting for a number of years, until it was acquired by Blue Gecko, Inc., a global provider of remote administration for Oracle, MySQL, and E-Business Suite. Jeremiah also teaches the Oracle certificate program for the University of Washington. Jeremiah is an Oracle Certified Master, a member of the OakTable Network, and a frequent presenter at industry conferences and user groups. His publications and whitepapers can be found at www.bluegecko.net.

Graham Wood is an architect in the database development group at Oracle. Most of his 20 years at Oracle has been spent in performance related areas, including designing and tuning large high-performance systems, building monitoring tools such as Statspack, and in architecting performance and scalability features into the database engine itself. More recently, Graham was the architect of the Oracle Manageability team tasked with simplifying the process of tuning the operation of the database which resulted in the development of AWR, ASH, and ADDM to provide automatic tuning.

Connie Green has 20 years of experience with Oracle products, the last 12 years working for Oracle U.S. server development. Connie's expertise is in database performance tuning. She designed and developed Statspack from its initial release. Over the years Connie has been privileged to work with many talented kernel developers, performance engineers, and support engineers, having been involved with library cache development, buffer cache development, and the query optimizer.

Karen Morton is a consultant and educator specializing in application optimization in both shoulder-to-shoulder consulting engagements and classroom settings. She is a Senior Technical Consultant for Enkitec. For more than 20 years, Karen has worked in information technology. Starting as a mainframe programmer and developer, she has been a database administrator, a data architect and now is a researcher, educator and consultant. Having used Oracle since the early 90s, she began teaching others how to use Oracle over a decade ago. Karen is a frequent speaker at conferences and user groups, an Oracle ACE, and a member of the OakTable network (an informal association of "Oracle scientists" that are well known throughout the Oracle community). She blogs at karenmorton.blogspot.com.

Randolf Geist has been working with Oracle software for 15 years. Since 2000, he has operated as a freelance database consultant focusing primarily on performance related issues, and in particular helping people to understand and unleash the power of the Oracle cost based optimizer (CBO). He is writing on his blog about CBO-related issues and is also regularly contributing to the official OakTable Network forums. Randolf is a member of the OakTable Network, the Oracle ACE program and is an Oracle Certified Professional DBA for Oracle Versions 8i, 9i, and 10g. He also maintains SQLTools++, an open-source Oracle graphical user interface for Windows.

Uri Shaft received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in database systems. He was the lead developer of the innovative QUIQ Inc. hybrid database and information retrieval system. Currently, Uri works for Oracle in the server manageability group. He is the developer in charge of the Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM), and of components that analyze the Active Session History (ASH) sampled data. Uri's areas of expertise include multimedia support in database systems, multidimensional indexing theory (and practice), and database performance diagnosis and tuning.

Melanie Caffrey is a senior development manager for Oracle Corporation, providing front-end and back-end Oracle solutions for the business needs of various clients. She is co-author of several technical publications, including Oracle Web Application Programming for PL/SQL Developers, Oracle DBA Interactive Workbook, and Oracle Database Administration: The Complete Video Course, all published by Prentice Hall. She has instructed students in Columbia University's Computer Technology and Applications Program in New York City, teaching advanced Oracle database administration and PL/SQL development. She is a frequent Oracle conference speaker.