Tech Update
OPPORTUNITIES IN DATABASE TECHNOLOGY

Today's databases are storing more info than ever before

Some techies consider the database the foundation of modern information technology
Today's DB pro needs to know multiple database types and platforms

By Susan Clark
Contributing Editor

IBM's Susie Siegesmund: turning to the multi-value database as a solution.

Dr Marie-Anne Neimat is Oracle's VP of development for embedded databases.

Lili Delalat heads up equity and fixed-income cash technology for a Wachovia group.

'Databases are the foundation of the information revolution," says Susie Siegesmund, director of IBM's UniData/UniVerse (U2) data services business ops.

Certainly, corporations today are storing more data than ever before. Some are being required to archive data as far back as seven or even twenty years. Others are looking to store e-mail, video clips and sound clips.

"This growing need to collect, organize and retrieve data has led to a greater dependency on database applications to organize and maintain the data," says Judaea Lane, senior database systems engineer at MetLife Insurance Co (New York, NY) and New York chapter president of Black Data Processing Associates (BDPA, www.bdpa.org).

Multi-value: add without subtracting
Database developers are being challenged to continually add functionality without taking anything away. "More and more companies are turning to the multi-value database as a solution," says Siegesmund, who has worldwide responsibility for all aspects of IBM's multi-value databases. "When we release a new product, we basically have to guarantee there will be no regression."

The multi-value technology, she explains, allows an element of a database table to contain multi-valued and multi-subvalued fields while maintaining association between the values. This seems to go against the first rule of normalization for relational database management systems (RDBMS). The space required to store the data is smaller and access requires just one read. "Multi-value databases are typically quicker to implement, faster to run and easier to modify," Siegesmund adds.

"It's not just about the underlying structures. You have to know about the tools you can run on it, and all interfaces that have to do with processing data."

Knowing one database may have been sufficient in the past, Lane notes, but today's DB pro needs to know multiple database types. That's because many apps connect and retrieve information from many sources: IBM's DB2 or UDB, Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft's SQL Server, MySQL and more.

Building the skills

Gina Billings.

BDPA is helping to build the DB skills of its members through conferences and courses. BDPA national president Gina Billings also points to the group's Student Information Technology Education & Scholarship (SITES) program which "trains young people to build Web apps with a database component."

The field is wide open. DB pros can develop databases for a vendor, or they can use their skills in industry to build apps that use servers or to administer and maintain databases.

Of course, many will move up to the manager level. "Wherever you find databases in heavy use, there will be opportunities for DB pros," says Lane.

IBM's Siegesmund adds that IT is a great field for women. More than many other technical fields, she says, it accommodates women who wish to retire temporarily and later return. She knows that's true, because she herself took a nineteen-year break from IT while raising a family. She kept her skills current during the hiatus with contract and pro-bono work, and a refresher course got her started on her current DB proficiency.

On the job at IBM, Siegesmund notes, her managers for development, marketing and product portfolio, her ops leader "and at least a fifth of my development staff" are women.

Dr Marie-Anne Neimat is a development VP at Oracle

Dr Marie-Anne Neimat.

Diversity at Oracle (Redwood Shores, CA) starts by cultivating an inclusive environment. Jane Robertson, senior director of diversity, explains that individual differences present opportunities to examine business issues from varying perspectives. This leads to greater agility and creativity "to effectively compete on a global scale."

Marie-Anne Neimat, PhD, is VP of development for embedded databases in Oracle's server technologies division. She's responsible for all aspects of developing, delivering, launching and maintaining three embedded database products: an in-memory database, an embedded transactional storage manager, and an embedded database for mobile devices that synchronize with the Oracle database.

Neimat manages a staff of more than eighty techies working as developers, development and product managers, test/quality engineers and documentation specialists. "Our objective is to deliver functionality that will take our products into the future while retaining our existing customer base," she says.

Trying to figure the direction each product ought to take is the most challenging part of the job. "What is the market going to be? Who needs what, when, and why? Are we able to deliver it?" are questions she has to address.

Neimat has spent most of her career in databases. She has a 1972 BS in math from Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA) and a 1974 MSCS and 1979 PhD in CS from the University of California-Berkeley.

In 1978 she went to work for HP Labs (Palo Alto, CA) as a software developer. She moved on to Britton Lee in 1981 as a database developer and to Dialogic Systems in 1983 as a software developer.

In 1985 she returned to HP Labs to manage several projects, one of which involved main memory databases. Later, with HP Labs' approval, she developed a business plan and led the effort to spin off that technology into a private company. TimesTen (Mountain View, CA) was launched in 1996 and successfully brought out its first product little more than a year later.

Neimat attributes a lot of that success to her management staff. "I knew the technical and engineering side, but I had never run a company," she says with a smile.

When Oracle acquired TimesTen in 2005 Neimat assumed her current position.

Wachovia's Lili Delalat: "DB is a big part of what we do"

Lili Delalat.

Wachovia CEO Ken Thompson believes that diversity is fundamentally about rewarding merit. "We are committed to diversity because it is the right thing to do for our company and each other," he says.

Lili Delalat is head of equity and fixed income cash technology in the capital market technology group at Wachovia's corporate and investment banking division in New York, NY. That means she's accountable for delivery of the cash side of the business.

"Technology is a huge part of the business flow in corporate investment banking," she says. "We're streamlining and automating processes that enable the desks to trade better, to see their position and the risks better so they can make better decisions."

Delalat manages a staff of more than fifty: DBAs, systems admins, C++ and Java developers, business analysts, QA folks and release controls specialists. They develop real-time order entry, order-management, trade-management and position-keeping systems for the traders and salespeople on the trading desks. "There's a lot of dependence on storing data, so the database is a big part of what we do," Delalat says.

She's a "hands-on" manager, and believes her strong technical skills help her meet delivery schedules. "I can anticipate bottlenecks and plan ahead," she says.

Delalat earned her 1986 BSCE and her 1988 MSCS at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her idea was to experience industry, then go back for a PhD, but after she joined Amdahl Corp (Sunnyvale, CA) as a chip design engineer, she never looked back.

She started transitioning from computer engineering to the software side when writing code to test her chips. She completed the transition when her husband became a professor at Rutgers and they moved to New Jersey in 1994. "The chip manufacturers are all in California," she explains.

She transferred her logic and problem-solving skills to a job as AVP/project leader at Lehman Brothers (New York, NY), where she built out the entire fixed-income finance desk. She joined Goldman Sachs (New York, NY) in 1999 as head of core transaction systems technology in equity, overseeing more than ninety real-time order management, position-keeping, exchange connectivity and customer connectivity systems. She moved, she says, "because I wanted to work for a technical manager so I could grow technically."

Wachovia brought her on board in 2005 to build out its algorithmic trading desk in equity. One of the changes, she explains, involves moving from relational databases to in-memory cache databases to speed up processing. "With the market getting tighter and tighter, we have to squeeze every nanosecond out of the system that we can get," she says.

Michael Sanchez: DB2 systems at Prudential's Pramerica

Michael Sanchez.

Pramerica Systems Ireland Ltd (Letterkenny, County Donegal, Ireland) is a software development center that develops and maintains the software used by its parent company, Prudential (Newark, NJ), to market, sell and support its financial products worldwide.

Michael Sanchez is a DB2 systems programmer at Pramerica. "My team here in Ireland works with a team in the U.S. to ensure that the database systems are working properly and efficiently with minimal downtime," he says.

Sanchez installs, upgrades and maintains software and provides on-call support for apps development personnel. As a systems admin he creates and migrates databases, conducts backup and recovery exercises and provides performance tuning. He likes to take on projects that offer new challenges. "I try to learn at least one new thing every day," he says happily.

Sanchez earned his 1996 BS in applied physics with a major in microcomputer instrumentation at the University of the Philippines-Los Baños. Then he worked for three years as a team leader and apps developer at Software Ventures International (Metro Manila, Philippines). He joined IBM Philippines in 2000 as an IT specialist in systems programming and developed expertise in DB engineering.

Sanchez was selected as part of a team of four to write a technical manual on moving data across IBM's DB2 family. The other team members were from Canada and Norway, and they all worked together for two months at IBM's Almaden lab in San Jose, CA. "I enjoy working with people of different nationalities," Sanchez says.

He moved to Accenture in 2004 as a team leader and systems analyst, then joined Pramerica in 2005 as a DB2 systems programmer and relocated his family to Ireland. "There is a strong Philippine community here that is very supportive," Sanchez says.

He feels it's important for IT pros to take charge of their own careers, seek out mentors and work on a variety of projects. Right now he's working on an MS degree in IT with emphasis on systems engineering from the University of Liverpool in the UK.

Pramerica has employees from twenty countries and sponsors a sports and social committee for its diverse employees. "We also maintain a diversity database for sharing memories of the home country," says HR director Mary Howick.

At SWIFT, Hai-Lung Chien is a lead developer

Hai-Lung Chien.

Hai-Lung Chien is a lead developer at the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT, located in northern Virginia). SWIFT is an international co-op owned by the financial industry. It supplies messaging services and software used by banks to complete trillions of dollars worth of financial transactions daily. The organization serves more than 8,000 financial institutions in 207 countries and territories. "It is a critical institution for the world financial industry," Chien says.

Chien is a systems engineer, part of a group that does tools development and maintenance for operational support systems. He works in support and systems admin as well as development, and is currently responsible for a tool that helps ops staff manage network, hardware and software changes.

To reduce the risk associated with changes to the core messaging infrastructure, he begins by developing and testing complex prototypes. "We need one hundred percent assurance that all messages are error-free without any downtime," he explains.

Chien earned his 1978 BS in math at TungHai University in Taiwan. He came to the U.S. for job opportunity, and earned a 1981 MS in math at Ohio State University.

His first job was as a programmer at Plaskolite (Columbus, OH). In 1984 he was promoted to IS manager with responsibility for a $1.8 million budget. "We provided software development and quality information to all business units," he says.

He joined SWIFT in 1987 to work on mainframe software system utilities. One of his first projects was developing a single-box testing environment with lifelike validation for his group. "The tool has been in use ever since and not one message has failed," he reports with pride.

Chien moved up to senior software engineer in 1990, lead DBA in 1997 and lead developer in 2001. He is happy and confident with his strong math foundation and logical reasoning, but he still finds the language barrier somewhat challenging. "I'm not a strong debater," he says, for cultural as well as linguistic reasons.

Michael Shepelak, HR director at SWIFT, attributes the organization's success to its practice of hiring the best talent on a global basis. "We recognize that our success internationally is in the hands of our diverse workforce," he says.

Robert Martin, Jr: foundation mainframe support at Mayo

Robert Martin, Jr.

At the Mayo Clinic (Rochester, MN), diversity is promoted as a strategic advantage contributing to greater innovation and creativity.

Robert Martin, Jr is a senior systems software engineer in foundation mainframe support within Mayo's foundation tech services. As storage admin he's responsible for system managed storage (SMS) for the apps community. "The computer has to know where your data is stored 24/7 in order to access and retrieve it when you need it," he says.

Martin was brought on board last year to convert Mayo's mainframe infrastructure environment to IBM's data facility system-managed storage (DFSMS) suite of products. He works with the apps group to determine where data will be stored, how it will be managed and when to back up the data. "I set up behind-the-scenes automation that takes the guesswork out of what they want done with their stored data," he says.

Martin earned his 1992 BSEE at Tuskegee University (Tuskegee, AL). His first job was as client relations rep at Total Systems Services (Columbus, GA). In less than a year he moved to IT and got into storage admin.

As a senior systems software analyst Martin was responsible for all aspects of DFSMS hierarchical system management. He monitored SMS storage groups and worked with vendors on capacity planning, configuration and data migration to newer storage platforms. He also supported the international apps programming community and three data centers, and was on the disaster recovery team.

Today, he says, enterprise storage subsystems are more reliable and have more internal automation. When a problem arises, the system recognizes the problem, contacts the engineer and may even fix itself to a certain extent. "It won't just blow up," he says. "It will actually phone home and say, "I'm having a problem here. Come and help me before it gets bad.'"

Gerald Cooper is a senior DBA at MGM Mirage

Gerald Cooper.

At MGM Mirage (Las Vegas, NV), says chair and CEO Terry Lanni, diversity is key to maximum motivation and performance of teams "at every level and across all the company's properties and businesses."

Gerald Cooper is a senior DBA in the software development department at the company's corporate services center. He's part of a team of four DBAs responsible for installing, configuring, maintaining and securing all corporate data and providing database performance, scalability and availability solutions. "The casinos are open 24/7 so we have to make sure these systems are running at top performance all the time," he says.

The company recently migrated to new hardware and a new enterprise SQL server. The project, Cooper notes, touched more than six SQL instances, 250 databases and more than 100 apps that run day-to-day ops. The process involved backing up and restoring the databases, attaching new storage, putting them into new cluster systems and applying database security.

Cooper was project DBA for reconstruction of IT systems at the Beau Rivage property in Biloxi, MS, damaged by Hurricane Katrina. "It was a huge team effort. We got the systems up and running within three days," he says proudly.

Cooper earned his 2000 BS/CIS at DeVry Institute of Technology (now DeVry University) in Columbus, OH. While a student, he interned for a year and a half as a technical support analyst at Central Ohio Transit Authority (Columbus, OH). "This was great hands-on experience and I got to see how the business community and the government work," he says.

After graduation he joined Honda of America Corporate (Marysville, OH) as a computer engineer. He was responsible for configuring and deploying pc workstations and printers for all the group's business users.

He joined MGM Mirage in 2002. "I wanted to move to an area that was more diverse, and also warmer," he says with a smile.

Cooper started as a helpdesk coordinator and moved into an entry-level DBA position within nine months, selected from forty-five applicants for this internal posting. "It's the biggest jump I've made in my career," he says.

Today he's a senior DBA, Microsoft-certified. The certification is a very intense program including many exams. But, "I learned a lot studying and interacting with my co-workers," Cooper says with appreciation.

Stephanie Le: software engineer and DBA at Applied Signal

Stephanie Le.

Stephanie Le is a software engineer in the multi-channel system department at Applied Signal Technology (Sunnyvale, CA). The company designs, develops and manufactures reconnaissance equipment to collect and process telecom signals. "Our systems help government agencies collect and manage signal intelligence," she explains.

Le is part of a team of five database developers who design, code and test software capabilities. The stored procedures she writes for the database server control how data is retrieved, deleted, updated and manipulated.

Le recently created new capabilities to update and modify the database through a GUI. Another project involved moving smart logic from the interface side into the database side. "It now takes seconds instead of hours to load a million rows of data," she notes with pride.

Le earned her 2002 BSCS at Santa Clara University (Santa Clara, CA). In college she interned at Cisco, doing database work and developing GUIs. After graduation she joined Applied Signal as a software engineer. "I learned a lot at Cisco but I prefer working for a smaller company," she says.

Le enjoys learning about technology. She takes advantage of the training, forums, courses and seminars the company offers and, in turn, mentors entry-level engineers. "Knowing about databases will be helpful in moving to higher levels," she says.

D/C

Susan Clark is a freelance writer in Hewitt, NJ.

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