Just-the-Biz Limited
Database Services
Previous Clients
Here, I reflect on some of the previous clients I have had the privilege of working with, over the years. In the course of my career, I have collaborated with a diverse range of very talented individuals and organizations, each bringing unique challenges and opportunities. These experiences have not only shaped my professional journey but have also allowed me to contribute in exciting ways to their projects. As I share these examples, my aim is to highlight the breadth and depth of the work I’ve been involved in, demonstrating the value I bring to each project.
British Telecommunications plc
Oracle DBA and Developer
While working full-time as a employee, at one-time I simultaneously held the multiple roles of: Production Oracle DBA (and UNIX System Administrator) for the National 999 database system (EDB); I was the Oracle DBA and UNIX System Administrator for all the development kit; and I was the Change Control Officer for this national project. I also provided 24 hour support for the system on a rota basis. From this position, I left BT to go freelance, and have been freelance ever since.
Document Distribution in the Financial Sector
On my first return to BT, this time as an independent contractor, I worked on a speculative BT project to develop a Documents Distribution System for the Financial Sector. During this time I provided DBA design and performance tuning skills to the project and designed, coded and demonstrated that the architecture’s 3rd party secure document transfer software could be replaced by some simple code written in Pro*C and running as a Windows NT service. My solution was more reliable than the original product, and included automated restart and delivery control, contained multiple methods of remote restart triggering and operated exclusively within in the database domain. It even allowed support personnel to invoke a ‘sounds-on’ command for remote NT machines which led to being able to audibly hear documents being transferred. A particular feature was that the system was able to transfer documents from remote NT machines to the Central Database using file-fragments over SQL*Net (which at the time did not support LOB data transfer).
National BT Marketing Calls Database
On completion of the previous project, I transferred to BT’s marketing area. Here I was involved in coding the data loading solution that was capable of loading, in an automated manner, 75 to 150 million national call records per day into a large centralised Oracle database. Additionally, I developed a lightweight process that was able to enrich the call data with the addition of customer id data. It had to operate on a minimal memory footprint normal for machines of the day). The target database was specified to be able to hold around 150 billion call records, being an estimated 18 months of national call data of the day.
NHS National Spine Programme
On a later contract with BT, I was invited back to work on a migration project to take 7 billion hospital procedure data records into a new Clearance Data Warehouse. I was basically given free reign to develop the whole migration component and additionally contributed to the development of C code modules for blowfish encryption and Pseudonymisation activities on the main daily process. Towards the end of the project I developed a software-state-machine XML parser (in perl, which generated C code) that was benchmarked at running 10 times faster than the Java standard XML parser of the day.
Siemens Nixdorf (Medical Portfolio)
Contract Oracle DBA
Hospital Administrative Database Product
Providing strictly Oracle DBA development support to a large group of developers based on a UNIX environment. This was probably the purest DBA contract I have taken so-far in my career and I had to provide general duties regarding backup definition, implementation and recovery operations. General developmental support to the developers.
SQL design and tuning advice was also a big part of this role.
Sapient
Contract Oracle Development DBA
I found myself being contracted to work on three projects at Sapient.
Sainsbury’s HomeBase
This was a major undertaking, in 2000 to provide the Sainsbury’s Homebase company a complete on-line store with back-office order fulfilment capabilities. At the time, the company did not have an online presence and this major project was to remedy this for them. On my first day on this contract I resolved a technical issue with the database, whereby it was not possible to create a domain index (in the Oracle Text-server product), as the command was continually reporting that it could not find a dynamic library, even though the client tool library path would have been able to locate the module. Using my UNIX knowledge, I managed to diagnose that the solution required the LD_LIBRARY_PATH to be set for the Oracle ‘Listener’, not the ‘client’. On making this simple change I then demonstrated the successful creation of the problematic domain index.
This contract was very fast-paced, with developers asking all manner of DB questions. I most enjoy environments that involve some degree of knowledge and mentoring, and this was one such contract. The people at Sapient were so fired-up and energetic and it was a great pleasure to work there.
Opodo.com Website
Opodo was a website commissioned by a number of Airline companies. They wanted a website to offer flight ticket sales directly to the public and they approached Sapient for this work. I was asked to return to Sapient (from the Bank of England) to provide DBA services for this project. At times, this project involved supporting nightly builds of up to 80 development environments and providing consultation to the 80 developers on the project. I would perform a weekly database schema release and would process and document any of the database change requests that the developers would raise during the week. Often, this would mean working until 2am - 4am to finalise the release for the next day of development.
DotP
This project was for the UK government. It attempted to standardise and consolidate the myriad of web-sites that various government organisations were beginning to proliferate at the time. I was requested to be the Oracle DBA on this project also, which ran for around 1 year before my developmental inputs were no longer required, due to project life stage. Again, this was a challenging and rewarding project, involving a profusion of skills and activities. In retrospect, Sapient’s projects were never mundane and always demanded far more that just plain DBA skills.
Bank of England
Contract Oracle Development DBA (at Threadneedle Street)
I was greatly honoured to work in the Threadneedle Street building in London for the Bank of England. Not a normal role for me with the Oracle databases being hosted on a Windows machine, but, I quickly requested a set of UNIX utilities for my Windows machine and was back in the familiar, hugely productive UNIX shell environment. Working for the Monetary and Financial Statistics Division, our databases were used to collate data returned from commercial and merchant banks to the central bank reflecting many aspects of banks’ activities, for analysis by the Bank of England.
The databases were used to compute reports that would feed into the decision making arms of the Bank of England and lead to decisions on, amongst others, the setting of the Bank of England interest rate. This was a highly important activity for the bank. I provided support for these systems and was able to offer some mentoring and consultation to the department’s developers.
Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise - National Intelligence Division
Contract Datawarehouse Consultant
This was my first contract in the city of London, in 1999.
An interesting consultancy role in which I analysed the interplay between disparate data sets with regard to forming a mechanism by which data in one data-set could be matched with data in other data-sets. As the data sets themselves had been created by separate agencies or bodies, there being no definitive key that could be used to solidly link the data together.
Within the frameworks of the enforced legalities of the task, I defined a strategy for the use of their bought-in search tool, that would allow for the rapid preparation of a data-set for either in-ward or out-ward linkages. Once prepared, this would endow the data with the ability to be linked to other data-sets which had been similarly prepared. I outlined, and gave detailed design for a fuzzy-match scoring mechanism that could be used to score the quality of any fuzzy linkages made between two suitably prepared, but disparate sets of data.
This role involved the assimilation of many complex mechanisms before presenting, what was regarded by the client to be, a very elegant and workable solution.
Credit Suisse (Cabot Square London)
Contract Oracle Development DBA
Being originally contracted to develop in-house tools for the provisioning, management and on-going monitoring of the company’s brand new Oracle data centre, this contract quickly changed to one of evaluating the suitability of a number of database monitoring tools which were already available on the market. This involved extensive analysis and communications with internal stakeholders and external suppliers. The output of this contract was a very comprehensive document, assessing of the capabilities of these tools and their fit for the new data-centre.
On conclusion of this contract, I had been offered a different role within Credit Suisse (again as a 3rd party contractor), but, I had been invited by some previous colleagues from Sapient, to the Royal Bank of Scotland, to be their Development DBA, and I left to pursue this option.
Royal Bank of Scotland (Credit Risk Management)
Contract Oracle Development DBA
It is always a great feeling when you are invited to join a project, and this was the case with my time at the Royal Bank of Scotland. A group of developers had left Sapient, and joined RBS as a team. I was asked if I would like to join them as a database consultant. The Banking Sector operates under a different paradigm to other industries and tend to operate within tighter controls and more defined procedures than I have experienced in other sectors.
While at RBS I managed the data model for the team and would rigorously prepare detailed model release notes and deployment scripts to be used to upgrade our support and production database schemas. I, as is customary in all my engagements, additionally provided DB consultancy to the development team, and SQL tuning advice where required.
British Gas (Headquarters Solihull)
Contract Oracle Development DBA
My very first contract assignment. I was contracted to offer DBA support and development consultancy to the staff at British Gas. This involved the setting up of internal Oracle databases for various courses which were run on site. UNIX and Oracle formed the basis for these courses and all student databases could be set up with a single command.
The assignment also expected me to personally mentor and train some other staff in the field of DBA activities. I always enjoy this aspect of an assignment and am always keen to pass on my knowledge and particular way of working. I use a combination of UNIX shell commands and shell scripts to perform most repetitive activities and am always looking for new and interesting ways to simplify any administrative tasks.