It is the Season to be Introspective

The days are cold and wet. The nights are long and dark and full of beeping pagers. It is time to look back and reflect on the past year and plan for next year.

Accomplishment of the year: I still can’t believe I’m a member of the Oak Table.
Big change of the year: Started working for Pythian. Databases are the same everywhere, but the work environment couldn’t be more different.
Obsession of the year: NoSQL. Fortunately, the hype is slowing down and the field is slowly maturing. Making everything more interesting and less franctic.
Overblown concept of the year: CAP Theorem. Everyone talks about it, but most of it makes not sense and is absolutely useless.
Contribution of the year: Another successful and profitable training day for NoCOUG
Proud of this year: Several customers who were upgraded to 11g successfully. Two customers with new dataguard. Automated weekly restore script.
New Expertise: I’m now very good with RMAN and DataGuard, competent with ASM and Solaris and much better than I ever thought anyone could be with vi and ssh.
Worst moments: Getting paged on a serious issue for a customer you are not familiar with, at 4am, while you are working on another urgent issue, your backup is not reachable and both customers want progress reports every 5 minutes.
Best moments: Mountain biking in Downieville. I’ll be doing lots more of this in 2011.
Guilty pleasure of the year: Either Twitter or Oban 14.
Programming Language of the year: Perl. I knew it for a while, but this year I used it more than in the last 10 years combined.
Presentation of the year: Everything a DBA needs to know about TCP/IP networks. Its far more useful for more people than I ever dreamed.
Startup I wish I started in 2010: Database as a service. Its becoming the next big thing but no one is doing it well (yet). After you outsourced your DBAs and sysadmins, just letting them own the servers at their own datacenter and VPN there is the next logical step.
Next year I will: Upgrade my OCP to 11g, video blog, and do a webinar.
I want to but probably won’t: I miss having the time to dig deeply into OS problems. Sometimes spending few days collecting data, traces, reading source code.
Mission for 2011: Convince people who never presented before to give a presentation. Because its a great experience and everyone has something important to share.
Unexpected 2011 Plan: Presenting at MySQL Conference. I sent an abstract because I love the MySQL community and want to enjoy them more. I’m still shocked it was accepted despite my bio that says “Oracle DBA”. I’ll try hard not to disappoint.
2011 Prediction: I’m betting on 2011 being the year of the cloud integration services. SaaS solutions such as SalesForce  are gaining traction with enterprise IT, and in enterprise IT, integrating with existing systems is the name of the game. I foresee great future for connector solutions and the consultants who can make them useful.
Far fetched 2011 Prediction: Oracle will buy Netapp. After HP got 3Par, that just makes sense.

Have an excellent 2011!