Congrats to Fahd Mirza on Becoming an Oracle ACE

Last week brought great news to Pythian — one of our DBAs in Pakistan, Fahd Mirza, has become an Oracle ACE. Fahd joined Pythian in September 2010 as the very first Pythian employee in Pakistan and thanks to his skills and ambitions ended up on the team supporting Exadata environments. Fahd is a long standing active community member, frequent blogger and passionate Oracle technologist evangelizing for Oracle technology in Pakistan. No wonder he got nominated as an Oracle ACE and was accepted.

I should also mention that another Oracle ACE DBA joined us recently — Jared Still. Jared is a well respected member of Oracle community, member of the OakTable Network and a veteran of the Oracle-L mailing list. Jared is a top notch Oracle DBA and huge fan of the most popular programming language at Pythian — Perl — and event wrote a book “Perl for Oracle DBAs“.

With all this, we have 5 Oracle ACEs & ACE Directors at Pythian now including Gwen Shapira, Christo Kutrovsky and myself. But that’s not all, Pythian is known as an incubator for Oracle ACEs (I think we were called the Oracle ACE Factory in one of the Oracle ACE newsletters) and it’s been a pleasure to have worked side by side with other Oracle ACEs and ACE Directors — Riyaj Shamsudeen, Doug Burns, Sheeri Cabral and Dmitri Volkov. Some of them became Oracle ACEs at Pythian, some before or after that and even though they are not working at Pythian now, they are still our good friends and help us out on many occasions with training or collaborating on exciting projects.

It’s a great initiative by Oracle through the Oracle ACE program to recognize active community contributors and passionate Oracle professionals around the globe! Well done Oracle!