Where should a grocery store place its products to increase sales?
When are people in a particular area most likely to use electricity?
What kinds of cars are selling in which cities?
The answer to all three questions can be found by plugging information into a database and using the database to pull out the relevant information. You might find out, for instance, that men tend to buy more potato chips when they’re placed next to the beer, Lincoln Park’s peak energy usage is on Thursday nights and large sedans aren’t selling well in Oak Lawn.
Oracle Corp. of Redwood Shores, Calif., is one of the world’s leading database companies. Its flagship product, Oracle 8, is employed by a wide variety of companies in different industries to collect and analyze data.
Jim Enright, a senior product manager in the company’s database division, works on improving the performance of Oracle’s products. The San Jose Mercury News talked to Enright about the employment aspects of the database industry and Oracle’s role in the industry.
This is an edited transcript of the interview.
Q–If I’m interested in getting into this industry, what types of education and experience would I need to get a job?
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A–There are certainly a lot of institutions that teach database technology . . . and a lot of companies in the database industry where you can gain experience.
My own experience was not a school-based one. But many people here have Ph.D.s, master’s, bachelor’s of science. And some like me that have just grown up with the computer industry and the software industry.
Q–Let’s say I work as a software developer at another company that’s not into databases. How easy or difficult would it be for me to come and work at a place like Oracle?
A–I think it would depend on the job. There are entry-level positions and there are advanced positions in the same group, so there’s quite a range of experience here.
To be in some of the core database areas–I mean, if you wanted to work on the database logger, where the internal history is kept of changes to the database–you would want to have database experience to know some of the dynamics of the programming environment. Because if mistakes are made in the logs, sometimes it can seem real innocent in the beginning and then all of a sudden, you’ve got a problem.
Q–Do the people who work in the database division specialize in one area of database technology or can they work on different projects within databases?
A–Well, we have a very diverse set of people here, so we have a diverse matching of skills to jobs.
If you took our top seven developers, you would probably be able to cover the product from end to end. That’s about as specific as people can get because the product is so large now. It really does take at least a half a dozen to cover all the different layers from the top-level language layers down to the lower layer of storage.
Q–Do you customize the database for different clients?
A–Yes, I would say we do.
Sometimes in my career, there have been occasions where customers have asked for something that they shouldn’t want. That can happen, where, if they have– more typically, at a smaller shop–people who know one skill set, then they’ll want something to change to suit their skill set rather than looking at the broader interests.
So we have to make sure we have a set of code that we can maintain and that offers a broad functionality to everyone.
If you have a bank teller that’s focusing on records one at a time, that’s a different thing than if you have 10 doctors all trying to take care of one patient.
In the core database product, typically we need to combine all the different views that people want into something that is going to be manageable and maintainable.
Q–What is the job market for database programmers right now? Is this a good job market to be in?
A–Yeah. In (Silicon) Valley, I don’t think the job market has really ever been much better than it is now. There’s quite a bit of hiring at just about all the software companies.
Q–If I were to get a job at Oracle or another company in the database market, what are my long-term prospects? Are there good prospects for advancement?
A–I think those vary, depending on getting the right experience and being exposed to the right things over time. And always when you go into a job, looking at what about the job is going to increase the options that you have . . . looking for things that constantly increase your horizons. And that’s what I’ve done. I started off essentially as a software technician.
So, it’s continuing to learn things that broaden your options.
Q–Much of Oracle’s business model seems to be based on the notion of centralizing data and having slim client applications. That seems to me to run counter to the last 20 years of computing. I mean, we’ve moved from a model of having a mainframe server and terminals to having more and more power on the desktop.
The Web is an example of how we’ve gone back in some ways to this more centralized data model. But outside of the Web, is that the direction computing is heading, toward moving more and more data to centralized locations? And how much of Oracle’s future growth depends on moving toward that model?
A–One of the advantages of being in the position that Oracle is in we can choose to participate in a lot of areas.
The centralized model, as you call it–there is quite a bit of benefit to continuing down that road; having a known set of people that will take care of and back up and be responsible for and maintain access to data. There are some good things about that.
My bank account, I don’t want that on somebody’s desktop, obviously. I want to know that somebody’s got that and that somebody’s made a copy of the tape and that that tape is in a vault somewhere geographically removed from the (seismically active) San Francisco area.
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Oracle as a company has been able to work a lot on distributed databases, replication. So we’ve really not committed to a particular design. I think we’re trying to make sure that people who are looking for options have them available. So there’s been quite a bit of work that’s been done in data replication and distributed systems at Oracle as well.
It really depends on what the customer wants.