First Week

It’s been all change this week as I’ve donned collar and tie and walked to work in the offices of one of the bigger finance companies in Scotland. A few interesting little experiences :-

Using a 3270 terminal emulator for the first time in ages to login to a mainframe and use TSO! I hasten to add that it’s just for admin tasks and not technical database-related work, but it’s a strange, vaguely familiar experience, all the same.

Clocking in and out of the office, so it’s fair to say that there’s always some kind of clock running at work! What I like about this clock is that it lets me smoke on my own time without working less hours than my colleagues but it’s unobtrusive otherwise.

Having written the Dev DBA article recently, my current client uses the model where the Dev DBAs are probably the most senior DBAs and have a lot of involvement in how applications are designed and implemented, which is cool. I don’t work in that team but I know some of the guys through the user group community and they have some smart people on that team. I just do the grunt work of deploying the applications to production, but I’m sure there’ll be some sensible dialogue along the way.

I’m working on some new 10g implementations so I can hopefully have a positive influence on the 10g standard deployment model.

Apex is very popular there and it’s a big company, remember, so I would say it augers well for the future success of Apex in the Oracle world.

Other than that, I don’t plan on saying any more about my work other than the purely technical. I think I’m going to enjoy working there, though 😉