On March 17, 2014, I became an employee of Oracle Corporation for the second time. My first round with Oracle started in August 1987. My second son, Eli, was less than a year old. I'd been incredibly bored with my consulting gig, which consisted of babysitting a reporting system on a DEC10 "mainframe", based on a flat-file database – but a database. So I checked the Help Wanted pages (no Internet, no smartphones, no LinkedIn) and came across an ad from Oracle Corporation. It contained the word "database", so I figured: "Why ?" I was hired, even though I was completely ignorant of relational databases. Ok, not completely. I'd read an article by Codd and memorized "Twelve Rules of Relational Databases." But no one ever asked me about relational theory. Instead the key question seemed to be: "Are you comfortable talking in front of groups, large and small?" I was, after all, interviewing for a "pre-sales" (sales cons
For the last twenty years, I have managed to transform an obsession with PL/SQL into a paying job. How cool is that?