Oracle “Technologist of the Year: Developer” Award

I am honored to receive Oracle’s Technologist of the Year: Developer award, formerly Oracle Magazine Editors’ Choice Awards.

Technologist of the Year Award is given for individuals for their technical achievements with regard to Oracle products.

As opposed to community based awards, to win this award one must be nominated by himself or his company. There are several award categories: Developer, DBA, IT Manager etc., and many nominations per category. I have been nominated by my company and am happy to have won the award in the Developer category.

Allow me to take the pleasant opportunity to make some acknowledgements.

makam

Most people know me as a MySQL consultant/instructor/speaker/something. I wear several hats; in one I am co-founder and CTO of SFNK, an Israeli company providing the makam system, a specialized service providing valuable insight on our customers increasing need: the need to know what people say about them on the internet. Our product is running for 7 years now, is serving large amounts of data, and is operating several MySQL server nodes.

I’ve been working with MySQL for over 11 years, but it is throughout my work in makam that I have come to look deeply into query & server optimization, backups, scale out, design etc. We had some demanding features that pushed me into developing scripts and solutions for MySQL, released as open source. Throughout my experience as a DBA (I’m originally a developer) I came to appreciate the MySQL product, on one had, and find usability fallacies, on the other. The fact that our product is DB centric put me in the position to learn as much as I could about SQL.

I thank makam for this. This product has been the test bed for many of my experiments. Thankfully I never erased the database!

The MySQL community

Though I just recently wrote this, I’m happy to acknowledge it again.

Since my work is based off open source products, open source projects, free advice, professional blogs, I have gained much from the open source world in general, and from the MySQL community in particular, that made me want to share some back.

Its wonderful to have people read and comment on my blog posts and ideas; download, use and provide feedback on code I write; attend an occasional talk. All this pushes me in my work. I honestly hope to have provided with valuable content, code or assistance, to just anyone. Anyone and someone who would benefit from the richness of open source and knowledge sharing.

I am humbled by the advantage I got from the community. I have found names behind the community’s first anonymous appearance. I’ve found people who are easy to reach, happy to respond, generous in their advice, experts in their field.

Thank you.

Oracle & MySQL

An observation on this award is that it is given to a MySQL technologist. I have never worked with Oracle (as in the RDBMS) technologies, and my entire nomination is based on my experience with MySQL.

I see significance in this, and believe it reaffirms the focus and attention MySQL gets from Oracle. It makes me happy as a MySQL user and as a MySQL community member.

I thank Oracle for giving me this honor.