See my CV or print it; there are alternative formats at the bottom. You might want, first, to read some words about myself and my work as follows…
I love relational database theory and practice, being willing & eager to learn more both in the range and the depth of the field.
In today’s organisations too often data is dealt with as a subproduct of application development or acquisition, or even worse as historical, legacy subproducts of normal, day-to-day business processes only. The result is tying data useability to a specific application program, to specific people’s undocumented knowledge, or even worse to a specific systems vendor.
In contrast with this, Data Administration and its main tool, the relational model, enable people and organisations to structure, store, query and use even so-called “unstructured” data, without the need for arcane systems programming or, even worse, object-oriented programming. Programming should be seen as a tool to use data, not as a barrier to entry at the proverbial data warehouse.
The two fundamental concepts here are data modelling, to organise data making it widely available to the common user; and data integrity, to ensure collected data is sane and useable. Defining and implementing these is the domain of the Data Administrator and the DBA. Only then will data be available to querying and sane enough to be relied upon.
Down to the systems level, I want to work with high-quality DBMSs, both those I have already had experience with (PostgreSQL, Oracle DBMS, IBM DB2) and new ones (Borland InterBase, FireBird, SAP DB).
Also I am a Unix administrator, willing to work with both familiar systems (Sun Solaris, HP-UX, GNU/Linux) and similar ones (BSD, IBM AIX, SCO). I also have experienced that the reliability of free software (open source) tools is a relevant plus, both as replacement or complement of proprietary technologies, in order to increase levels of service while reducing costs.
Deeply intertwined, and even more important than the quality of the tools, is proper data administration in the organisation. Even if today’s tools still do not allow us to directly store and use a conceptually clean model of the organisation’s data, forcing one to make conceptual compromises for implementation reasons, it is still important to approach such implementation issues from a conceptually strong position.
I value a technically sound work environment, and intend to foster one wherever I work. That would include conditions to keep the conceptual integrity of the system by proper design and planning, proper documentation and coding, and due attention to security and recovery issues — besides fostering a healthful personal relationship with the team and each person with the goal of achieving smooth work where everyone faces new technical challenges and grow together.
I started working during my University years. I was first a trainee at Siemens, the Brazilian branch of the German electrical & electronics manufacturing conglomerate. While I chose not to continue there, due to travelling distance between home, campus and offices, it was a remarkable experience: the whole organisation was going thru a total shake-up, divesting itself off several non-rentable divisions and trying to build a more efficient organisational culture.
Then after one year of exclusive dedication to studies and the IVCF local branches, I spent a semester working as a commercial assistant at Ecodata, a Brazilian company formed from the local branch of UK Cable & Wireless, that had manufactured and serviced teletypes and printers, and had represented Dataproducts, the data entry equipment manufacturer. They were considering entering the PC services and network communications & workflow software market, and represent Brother, the Japanese office printers manufacturer, and I assisted in the market research for those then-prospective actions.
Due to this contact with the workflow software concepts I took some courses in data processing at the University, and when graduated looked for system analysis opportunities. I began as a Junior System Analyst at Banco Itaú, the second biggest private bank in Brazil, where I worked during almost three years maintaining the routines that dealt with cancelled cheques. There I gained familiarity with big volume batch mainframe processing, in a highly structure environment. I also initiated and helped conduct the automation of one of the last manual procedures in the Brazilian inter-bank system of documents exchange.
My next stage was in the start-up phase of LG Electronics in Brazil, when the Korean conglomerate decided entering the Brazilian market of electro-electronics with local manufacturing facilities. As part of a two-people team, many months later enlarged by a single high-school apprentice, we set a 60 PCs local network connected to both manufacturing plants and the US and Korean headquarters; I took over as well the administration of a Sun Solaris machine running Oracle for the HR and payroll system, and of MS Windows NT machines as file server and NCD WinCenter (later Citrix WinFrame UIS). I dealt also with DNS, DHCP, web cache, logs and filters, and implemented Samba as a higher-performance, higher-reliability alternative to MS SMB file sharing services on the MS Windows NT systems. This, coupled with the NCD WinCenter hosting the more demanding financial applications, prevented pressure for PCs upgrades, and enhanced user satisfaction significantly. All this was done with no training, relying solely on products documentation and Internet peer support. I also took most of the responsibility on instructed the apprentices on both general computing and PC, LAN, server and database concepts.
After this start-up phase passed the operations were taken over by a Korean team from LG, and I decided to move on to Amdocs, the world’s biggest telephony customer care & billing system, with the intention of honing my database administration skills. While my tasks there consisted mostly of managing the application side of the database system, I gained considerable international experience, as well as kept doing some system administration tasks during shorter periods such as test environments administration and web caching and proxy. Again I did some instruction, this time not only of trainees but also users. I also did data model reverse engineering and business support data querying.
My next position was with Orange Communications Switzerland as test environments administrator. There I found myself in charge not only of system test environments for the Amdocs Ensemble application, which is the core system for Orange customer care and billing operations, but also user-acceptance tests, training and a “mini-production-like” test environments; besides some database management and operations tasks. In the first few months me and my predecessor were juggling a workload for a three-people team. During the intervening months, with the help from immediate management, I streamlined, formalised, documented and automated procedures so that from a workload of approximately 250% I ended up with a 70% percent workload, and was about to take responsibility for other systems testing such as CRM when the company went through dep cuts due to huge losses from its controller, France Telecom.
Returning to Brazil, I accepted a short stint at the Electronic Government initiative of the City of São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest one. There, besides administrating the internal host-and-terminals Debian GNU/Linux network serving too the few remaining MS Windows systems, I coordinated the development and maintenance of the similar systems deployed at around 100 Telecentros, constituted of one Debian GNU/Linux and up to 20 remote booting, diskless terminals to support classes, web surfing, email and community initiatives; and the development of a custom Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution, named Sacix, to be distributed to the Telecentros’ users so that they can use even old hardware to have at home an user environment similar to the one they learn at the Telecentros.
I then accepted a challenge to help Web-Link, a small company creating retail and card systems. There I modelled databases, both creating some new models and supporting inherited systems, and managed both databases and systems. I also took over the system analysis of a credit card system which was doomed from the start due to unreasonable expectations of our client, who was also main investor and customer of our retail system.
Next step was spending nearly three months as Senior DBA at a tax reform project, guided by the IMF and sponsored by a consortium of European governments, at the Republic of Mozambique.