Oracle Magazine - September/October 2007 - Marcelo Machado

Innovating and Unplugging
Three peers celebrate getting online and occasional escapes.
Lutz Hartmann
How did you get started in IT?
During university, I worked in
Hamburg University’s statistics
department, dealing with large
amounts of data. I was especially
interested in indexing
multilingual data for library
catalogs. When I started studying,
there were two machines
available in our entire department. When I left the university, we
had installed a network, linked three scientific libraries to the
international library network, and installed computing pools.
How did you help bring the university up to speed in terms of its
systems and connectivity? I organized
a get-together with the
department director, the library
staff, and technical staff from the
university’s data center. We discussed
possible options for linking
the department with the Web, and
while there was money available for
the hardware, there were no funds
for the necessary work. I suggested
we coordinate the installation with
volunteers, and it was all done in
two weeks during summer break.
If you were going to the Space Station
for six months and could only take
communityPEER-TO-PEER
peerSPECS
Company: sysdba database
consulting GmbH, a network of
Oracle experts
Job title/description: Founder
and owner, offering Oracle
training and premium consulting
and support services for Oracle
databases
Location: Near Zurich, Switzerland
Oracle credentials: Oracle
Certified Professional (Oracle9i
Database, Oracle Database 10g ),
with eight years of experience using
Oracle products
Oracle ACE
otn.oracle.com/community/
oracle_ace
one Oracle reference book, what would it be? K. Gopalakrishnan’s
Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters Handbook [Oracle
Press, 2006]—it gives comprehensive insight.
Eric Marcoux
What’s your favorite tool or technique
on the job? Since last year,
my favorite tools have been
Oracle JDeveloper and its
Oracle Application Development
Framework [Oracle ADF], especially
Oracle ADF Faces. I can
now build and deliver simple
Web applications more quickly.
What advice do you have about how to get into Web and database
development? My first advice would be to think differently,
because Web development is not the same as client/server
30 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2007 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
development. Then, you must
think in tiers, because Web development
involves the separation
of layers—presentation, business,
persistence. By using a component
model approach, it is much easier
to reuse, thus simplifying development
and delivering Web applications
quickly.
Do you have a favorite vacation spot?
Every summer weekend I go to
my favorite campsite with my
family. I have no internet access, no phone, and plenty of time
to spend with my wife and three children.
Daniel Uehara
What big changes in technology
have you witnessed in the course
of your career? It’s amazing how
the Java IDEs have evolved over
time. I remember when I started
programming Java and we had
a few IDEs, most of them just
nice look-and-feel text editors.
Now we have tools like Oracle
JDeveloper, which basically does everything we need, and for
the things we can’t do we just need to create an extension.
At EDS, we’ve been able to integrate Oracle JDeveloper with
some of our standard tools from the project lifecycle to get a
full software engineering environment.
What would you like to see Oracle, as a company, do more of?
Oracle’s portfolio of products is getting bigger. It would be
helpful if we had a clearer mapping between the products
and types of services we can
develop with them, and a path
of training, tutorials, and documents
that would help us get
ready to apply a product to a
certain service domain.
What’s your favorite thing to do that
doesn’t involve work? Running is
my hobby. It’s when I have the
opportunity to unplug from the
network and relax from the stress
of globalization and being available
on demand. �
BY BLAIR CAMPBELL
peerSPECS
Company: Fujitsu Consulting, a
client-focused IT services provider
Job title/description:
Consultant, specializing as either
an Oracle technical architect or a
Java Platform, Enterprise Edition,
technical architect
Location: Quebec City, Canada
Length of time using Oracle
products: Six years
Oracle ACE
otn.oracle.com/community/
oracle_ace
peerSPECS
Company: Electronic Data Systems
(EDS), a provider of business
and technology solutions to help
clients worldwide improve business
performance
Job title/description: Manager
of the EDS Java Center of Expertise,
overseeing a team of 140 Java
developers
Location: São Paulo, Brazil
Length of time using Oracle
products: Seven years
Oracle ACE
otn.oracle.com/community/
oracle_ace