| Get to know some of our talented authors featured in our author spotlights. You can see interviews, detailed biographies, and book summaries of some of the best in the industry.
The author of our Oracle 8.0 and Oracle Developer 2000 tests. Robert is currently the Chief Information Officer at Valuestar, Inc.
ROBERT: I'm a refugee from political science that made good designing databases in the best refugee camp in the world, San Francisco. I've been doing software engineering, database design, project management, and development management in and around Silicon Valley for 17 years at companies like Oracle Corporation, Symantec, Interactive Development Environments, Objectivity, and Blyth Software. I've written 9 books including my latest, Database Design for Smarties, from Morgan Kaufmann. I'm now Chief Information Officer at ValueStar, Inc., the consumer service rating firm that rates service providers in California, Dallas, and Chicago (www.valuestar.com).
ROBERT: I've always hated taking tests, so I decided it would be interesting to take a test that tortured people who were forced to take them. Really, I wanted to see what designing a really effective test was like and how well I could do it. I think it came out pretty well.
ROBERT: I wrote two tests, one on Developer/2000 and one on Oracle8. I most enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of thinking about how to phrase right and wrong answers; it's easy to be wrong, but it's hard to be wrong intelligently to create a set of answers that are not obvious.
ROBERT: A friend and ex-employer, George Koch, asked me to do the second edition (updating it to Oracle7) of his best-selling book Oracle: The Complete Reference from Osborne/McGraw-Hill. I found I liked the process of writing as much as reading.
ROBERT: Creating and publishing my project management framework in my book, Productive Objects, from Morgan Kaufmann (1998).
ROBERT: Database Design for Smarties: Using UML for Data Modeling teaches you how to use the Unified Modeling Language--the official standard of the Object Management Group--to develop and implement the best possible design for your database. The book leads you step by step through the design process from requirements analysis to schema generation. You learn to express stakeholder needs in UML use cases and actor diagrams, to translate UML entities into database components, and to transform the resulting design into relational, object-relational, and object-oriented schemas for all major DBMS products.
ROBERT: Read, read, read. I read about 20 magazines and journals a month as well as subscribing to various email newsletters and surfing the Web. Star Wars movies are good too.
ROBERT: The Developer/2000 test (80 questions) tests the full range of knowledge a person who has used Developer for 6 months to a year should have. It covers Forms, Reports, and Graphics and focuses on practical, not theoretical, knowledge. Like Developer, sometimes it can be tricky because the choices aren't obvious. My advice to those taking the test is to think before answering, then choose the best answer, not the "only" answer.
ROBERT: Use the software in real-world projects. Tutorials teach you how to use the menus, working with the product over a period of weeks on work that will be of value to someone teaches you far more. The biggest barriers to learning are the relatively high expense of training or acquiring the software for training (Developer and Oracle8 are not personal software products, really) as well as the huge barrier that the software designers put in place by making the systems less usable than might be desireable in a perfect world.
ROBERT: Database management is moving toward more extensive standardization and a broader array of standardized features. It's also moving quickly toward object-oriented technology. I would like to see the standards process move much more quickly and to see Oracle and the other vendors adopt the standards much more quickly. Standards need to outpace the technology so that vendors aren't forced to develop their own approaches then abandon them later; the installed base guarantees they won't do that.
ROBERT: While getting my Ph.D. in political science at MIT, I used early relational databases to help in analyzing social scientific surveys and other data using statistical packages. I was so impressed with the technology that I decided I'd rather work on it than go onto the academic treadmill. So in 1983 I joined Oracle Corporation and I've never looked back.
ROBERT: ReviewNet is the best thing to happen to IT hiring since somebody invented team interviewing. Having well-written, professional tests available on specific technologies that a company can apply on demand is a super way to test knowledge. Of course, knowledge is only a part of the hiring equation; in IT, however, it's a big part. But IT managers should consider using the tests in other ways: as indications of the training required for a new hire (not just to exclude people who have less knowledge) and as internal tests for skill assessment and promotion evaluation.
ROBERT: As ReviewNet suggested, I tried to make the questions clear and to the point to avoid people making mistakes due to the test rather than to lack of knoweldge. I also covered a broad array of technology to give the hiring manager a good feel for the varying kinds of knowledge a candidate might have.
ROBERT: At ValueStar, we have begun to use database technology and application development in very interesting ways to support our mission to help consumers to find the best service providers. I'm combining my work in database design, application development, and statistical analysis in very interesting ways to support consumers and the businesses they want to use. Beyond that, I hope to write more books (Oracle8i is coming, and UML use cases demand a thorough treatment somewhere).
|
