scholar [skol-er]
noun
1. a student; pupil.
2. a learned or erudite person, especially one who has profound knowledge of a particular subject.
- Source: Dictionary.com
And I consider myself a scholar of databases. Someone who is still learning, still discovering everyday; and someone who has also; over the years gained certain expertise that can be used to help and mentor others.
As a pupil, I am overwhelmed by their expanse and intrigued by their complexities. How much has database technology evolved and what can a database not do?
From being just a storehouse of data to the storehouse of knowledge, from being an amalgamation of few commands to having millions of lines of optimized business logic code, from being just a collection of entities to being a collection of entities, objects, relationships and documents, from reading just plain text data to binary data like images, graphs, and the like; databases can do it all and a lot more.
And to achieve this all, the behind the scene work that a database does. The architecture that supports it all. The way it manages locks, achieves ACID compliance, maintains concurrency, handles high number of client connections, sharding and partitioning to manipulate humongous amounts of data running into Terabytes, parallel architecture to achieve faster processing, archiving, HA and all the behind the scene processes that makes the database co-ordinate and connect the pieces together; is a complex but intriguing beast.
Data is the most important asset of an organization. The most critical and the most revered and consequently, the most guarded and securely held asset. Databases provide the perfect platform to achieve data protection. A database used to its full potential, holds tremendous power because not only does it secure the data; it also converts that data into meaningful information. And it is this power that I love to explore, I love to specialize in.
As an expert, I have gained great insights into database technologies in general and Oracle database in particular, that I believe can be used to help, guide and mentor others. It is this intention that has given birth to www.thedatabasescholar.com
