I am a senior Oracle DBA with 20+ years of experience in the Oracle industry. Having spent the last 15 years working in the UK, I have recently moved to the US. For the 15 years in the UK, I worked mainly with e-DBA, a remote support organization that provided 24x7 support for medium sized businesses such as The Economist and The Express publishers, sections of the NHS, banking, online trading and retail systems. Within this support construct I have implemented and managed Oracle systems using ASM, Replication, RAC, and Grid management solutions. I have written SQL and PL/SQL as required by customers and to manage environments. I have always needed to adapt quickly and I enjoy these challenges.
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Skills | Experience | Total Years | Last Used | |||
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Oracle 12c, db and grid control environment mgmt | newest version, few months | <> | this week | |||
Oracle 11G, 10G DBA | strong DBA experience | 5 years+ | this week | |||
Oracle 7, 8, 8i, and 9i Database Administration | very good | 10-15 | recently | |||
SQL, PL/SQL development | proficient for DBA work | 20+ | recently | |||
backups/recovery (inc RMAN) disaster planning | very good | 15-20 | recently |
I currently assist my old team in e-DBA on an as-needed basis. Most recently, this has meant reviewing a new Oracle 11G and 12c setup on Exadata servers using RAC with 12c cloud management.
From outside the day-to-day support I am able to make objective recommendations and review current monitoring profiles.
Mostly, this includes:
In this period of time, I have relocated my family recently to the US. We are settling down into the area and I have been telecommuting via the e-DBA centralized systems.
In 1999 I founded e-DBA in order to provide remote database systems support to a growing number of dot com companies.
Among my initial clients were well-known initiatives such as Carphone Warehouse's MViva, B4Baby, Ready2Shop and Flutter gaming sites. As the dot com market began to struggle, my customer base became stronger with media companies such as The Express Newspapers and The Economist Magazine.
The tough IT economy in the early 2000's meant additional companies such as Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust and Cornwall Radiology and similar organizations began to come into our customer base.
In 2001, my husband, Justin Hudd joined as the main company director while I focused on growing our technical support provision and supporting our sales people.
By the time we sold our business in 2011 to Alex Louth, we had 28 direct members of staff as well as various part-timers and consultants.
My husband and I made a lifestyle choice to sell the business and return to our grass-roots of technical work. More than any other roles I held in our company, I have always enjoyed the direct role of Oracle Database Administrator with all of its own constant growth and changes.
In my time at e-DBA, I worked in the 24x7 on call across all years and also within the on-site consultancy service that we provided.
I provided Peoplesoft and Oracle Support for The Express and The Economist. I provided Oracle Replication support for our banking customers, Fortis, iLearning support for the NHS in Cornwall, RAC support for organizations like Totemic. In general, our specialties included RMAN and manual standby and disaster recovery review, test and implementations along with performance and troubleshooting of 8i,9i, 10G and 11G Oracle databases.
I also wrote and supported some key pieces of the SQL and PL/SQL code that monitored and collected statistics on our various environments as well as reports that we produced and provided to customers.
I joined Sun Microsystems as part of their new UK service branch, Oracle Professional Services. At the same time, I was marrying my British husband and it was a perfect opportunity to relocate to my husband's home country.
Sun systems were and are one of my favorite platforms. I enjoyed the experience of working abroad and especially in the London business districts.
I was one of the few persons in the new Sun PS team that was constantly booked out for the first 6 months there and did not really see others in the Sun organizations as much as I did the clients to whom I was assigned.
My main customer was The Express newspapers. At The Express I served as the main Oracle DBA during a new Peoplesoft on Oracle and Sun implementation. I worked as the right hand man to the Peoplesoft project manager, Gary Mead.
My main roles included working with others in IT to understand how to work with and support Oracle databases as well as working with key business contacts to understand their Oracle/Peoplesoft requirements. I implemented, patched, monitored and tuned the Oracle database systems day-to-day. I also managed Oracle portions of the testing and release cycles for the new Peoplesoft environment.
I met and worked with many interesting people there including their IT director, Peter Everiss and consulting Peoplesoft expert, David Kurtz. I was able to draw from my experience with Oracle eBusiness suite to understand the basics of Peoplesoft eBusiness, that was relatively new to me. My colleague there, David Kurtz, wrote one of the most recognized books about Peoplesoft on Oracle Administration that is currently available. I also visited a few other customers while in England with Sun, but more than 90% of my time was spent at the Express.
I chose to become self-employed for flexibility in choice of projects and exposure to new environments. For this period of time, I worked primarily for Warpspeed (Walnut Creek, CA), Macromedia Software (San Francisco) and Wells Fargo (San Fran., CA). Here is a brief summary of the freelance work I carried out:
At PBI, I worked as a senior DBA and, soon after I arrived, became the Oracle DBA team lead with group of 5 DBA's. My director was Andres Gutierrez. We provided an integral part of the technical support for a constantly growing and evolving 24x7 customer billing and support system.
We worked closely with systems and network administrators as well as various development teams and business leaders within the organization.
My direct work involved upgrades, patching and other Oracle maintenance as well as regular development to test and production software deployments, 24x7 troubleshooting for live problems and use of Oracle Designer 2000 suite for design of new database components.
I transferred within Oracle to work in the main corporate Data Center in Redwood Shores. This was because I had a keen interest in furthering my DBA skills specifically.
I worked with the Data Center applications DBA team under Matthew Yearling. I was in an amazing team that included Woei Lee and Don Beusee. We managed many systems 24x7 for Oracle Corporation that included the 'bugs' and knowledge base databases used for overall technical support as well as providing 24x7 support for the corporate HR system.
This was a very interesting and challenging and exciting environment where I was able to learn from some of the best DBAs in the industry. We supported many customised interfaces to the Oracle applications and the database connectivity shells. This meant troubleshooting and developing code with SQL, PL/SQL and C as well as troubleshooting Oracle Forms and Reports.
We used manual standby systems to provide backups and quick recovery systems as well as for templates for new database development and testing environments. We supported the customer facing Oracle Support teams and were in constant contact their departments as well.
I joined Oracle in the Government Services Working under manager Rick McKay for Oracle eBusiness suite client TVA in Knoxville.
I was recruited directly from finishing my Bachelors degree in Computer Science at UTK. My previous experience had been mainly in C programming on Sun UNIX servers for my program and the University Library (assisting in the creation of a gopher system that cataloged incoming abstracts).
As I joined Oracle, I developed, modified and maintained custom changes for the new Oracle Financials applications at TVA. This was done through the use of Oracle Forms, Developer and PL/SQL.
I was represented our team at various TVA facilities, including visits to nuclear facilities as well as a couple of months in Chattanooga developing financial reports with PL/SQL and Oracle Reports for the TVA head of the project.
I also competed with my team in a government bid for NASA in New Orleans. We had a light government clearance done for this. This was a wonderful introduction to Oracle environments and structure. During that first year I learned that while I enjoyed development, my favorite areas of work were with in DBA support and client facing relationships.
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