Rick Greenwald has been active in the computer industry for more than 25 years. He is currently Director of Partner Enablement at Oracle, where he has worked for more than 10 years. He is also the author or coauthor of more than 15 books, including the best-selling Oracle Essentials for O’Reilly & Associates, now in its fourth edition; Beginning Oracle Application Express from Wiley; Professional Oracle Programming from Wrox; and Oracle Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Solutions from Wiley.
Robert (Bob) Stackowiak, vice-president of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing in the Enterprise Solutions Group at Oracle, has worked for more than 20 years in the IT industry. His roles have included software development, management of software development, systems engineering, sales and sales consulting, and new business innovation and development. Bob has spoken at numerous computer-related conferences and has conducted briefings with companies around the world. He has coauthored several books, including Oracle Essentials: Oracle Database 11g (4th Edition) by O’Reilly and Oracle Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Solutions by Wiley. In addition, his papers regarding data warehousing and computer and software technology have appeared in publications such as The Data Warehousing Institute’s Journal of Data Warehousing.
Maqsood Alam, senior manager of product development at Oracle, is a software professional with more than 15 years of experience working with Oracle technologies, specializing in databases, maximum availability architectures, data warehousing, database migrations, and business intelligence. His current initiatives are focused on evangelizing Oracle Exadata, performing customer Proof-Of-Concepts and benchmarks, promoting best practices for migrations to Oracle from Oracle and non-Oracle databases, and also providing support to customers undergoing large Exadata implementations. He is an Oracle Certified Professional and holds a master’s and a bachelor’s degree in computer science.
Mans Bhuller, senior director of Database, Operating Systems and Management, Enterprise Solutions Group, Oracle, has worked at the forefront of emerging technologies at Oracle Corporation for the last 14 years. In this role, he has been paving the way for the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and other foundational technologies, such as Real Application Clusters (RAC), Grid, and Private Cloud. Mans is active in the Oracle Enterprise Architect community and has visited hundreds of customers. Recently, he has been building internal teaching classes around Exadata and Private Cloud and training others.
Kevin Closson is a performance architect in Oracle’s Systems Technology Group focused on Exadata and future platform solutions. His 24-year career has included engineering, technical marketing, support and application development positions specializing in Oracle, and clustered platforms. Prior to his tenure with Oracle, Kevin held positions within HP, PolyServe, IBM, Sequent Computer Systems, and Veritas where his main engineering focus was throughput and scalability enhancements of the Oracle server on high-end Unix SMP and clustered systems. Kevin holds patents in SMP-locking algorithms and database caching methods. He is a frequent speaker at industry trade shows such as Oracle OpenWorld, IBM PartnerWorld, IOUG-A, and regional Oracle user groups. In addition to book collaborations, Kevin’s written works have appeared in IBM Redbook, Oracle Magazine, Oracle Internals Magazine, SELECT, and CMG. He is a charter member of the OakTable Network Organization. Kevin maintains a popular technical blog at http://kevinclosson.wordpress.com.
Maria Colgan is a principal product manager at Oracle Corporation and has been with the company since version 7.3 was released in 1996. Maria’s core responsibilities are data warehouse best practices and the Oracle Optimizer. Based on Maria’s extensive experience in Oracle’s Server Technology Performance Group—where she conducted competitive customer benchmarks and tuning sessions—Maria creates and lectures on data warehouse best practices and in-depth insights into the Oracle Optimizer and the statistics it relies on.
Tim Shetler leads product management for the Systems Technology Group at Oracle. His product responsibilities include the Exadata Storage Server, database high-availability, database performance, compression, backup, and archiving. He has spent most of his career working with database management products, initially developing applications with Andersen Consulting (Accenture), and subsequently in product management and marketing roles at Hewlett-Packard, Informix Software, TimesTen, InQuira, and Oracle, with a primary focus on parallel processing and ultra-high-performance systems.