DataToTheMax - Small Business Website Design and Hosting

In 1983, as a young airman in the US Air Force, my family of three was stationed at Grissom AFB in Indiana as a Financial Management Specialist. Shortly after my arrival, a new type of technology arrived called a personal computer. The AT&T 8086 computer did not have much software, did not use anything like Windows, did not have an internet connection, nor did it connect to a network or modem as these things were non existent or very expensive. Since I was the new guy on the block and fresh out of technical training, I was chosen as the one that needed to figure out what to do with it.

I was already doing my job with IBM punch cards so the initial purpose of the PC was to replace the cards with an 80 column text file that could be stored on a disk and loaded into the mainframe instead of using the card reader technology which was prone to bad "reads" and subject to errors when the cards were not in the correct order. And heaven forbid if the stack of cards was dropped on a rainy day!

Before long, I discovered a little program on the PC called "Basic" that enabled me to write my own programs and soon I was writing programs that enabled me to do my job faster, better and with less errors. I branched out into writing programs for other areas in Accounting and Finance. In 1989, I was stationed at Keflavik NAS Iceland where I continued to write small helpful programs. I began to work with my coworkers and learned how they did their jobs and I learned to write applications in such a way that it would minimize the learning curve of how to use these helper programs. For example, one person had a job to compile information from the Navy civilian payroll printouts that came out once every two weeks, and make updates to the Air Force accounting system to process the civilian payroll into Air Force accounting system. Typically, this task was done manually and took a person most of 2 weeks to complete and keep balanced. I wrote a program that enabled the numbers to be entered directly from the Navy payroll printouts and it would complete a series of computations and then generate the output in a form for easy entry into the system. This helper program included a chart of accounts to reconcile the balances, and provide a method to validate all entries are correct. The task was now able to be completed in two and a half hours instead of 2 weeks!

In 1992, I left the Air Force and started working for the State of Delaware as an accounting technician. I spent 6 hours a day typing payment vouchers for the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control Laboratory. In the left over time each day, I began to write a program that would enable me to use a dot-matrix printer to print on the 4-ply payment vouchers and just enter information on the computer that needed to be put on the voucher. I was able to complete all the payments for a week in about 2-3 hours. I was then promoted and started customizing the reports from the mainframe in Fortran 77. I started learning about relational databases as the mainframe used a proprietary database engine from Perkin Elmer/Concurrent Computer. Eventually we decided to migrate from the mainframe and dumb terminals to Windows NT servers connected to desktop computers over an ethernet. I ran the ethernet wires, installed network hubs, administered Windows Servers, installed dozens of desktop computers, etc. We began to connect the computers to the laboratory instruments and thus to the databases. I wrote programs to interface the data from the instruments and present them for approvals after which the data was then pushed into a centralized database that was used to generate the lab reports. We began to explore and use other software including Windows NT Server, MS Access, Oracle and Visual Basic.

In 1999, I left for the private sector and found a position as an Oracle Database Administrator at F. Schumacher & Co in Newark Delaware. Among the projects at FSCO was a migration of the old data warehouse to an IBM AIX server (S70) and to Oracle 9i. AIX has to be my favorite operating system. The software and hardware were bullet proof and the system just kept on running. No matter what happened such as power outages and file corruption, everything was recoverable again and again.

In 2001, I moved on to MBNA in Wilmington Delaware as an Oracle Database Administrator for the Corporate Operations and Fulfillment business unit. At first the database servers were continuously going down and performance was very slow. Within a few months, these issues were resolved and performance was excellent and the server and database stability continuously peaked at nearly 100 percent. Along the way I upgraded them to new servers and from Oracle 8i to Oracle 9i. There were two types of applications that used the databases, one was Web based and the other was client server based. These applications managed all the marketing information such a the envelope packaging and marketing campaigns, group administration for all the groups that partnered with the bank, the card ordering and tracking for the plastic (credit card) inventory that is issued by the bank, the group exclusion tracking for maintaining the group/product exclusion matrix for tracking the contractual agreements by product that should not be marketed to the specific group membership, and the on-line images of all the group contracts for the bank.

In 2005, I moved on to Micros Systems Inc in Columbia Maryland as a Senior Oracle Database Administrator for the MyMicros.net Hosting Operations team. The database servers were continuously going down and performance was very slow. Within a few months, these issues were resolved and performance was excellent, and server and database stability was peaked at nearly 100 percent (hmmm, a bit repetitive). Along the way they were migrated from Oracle 9i to Oracle 10g RAC on ASM with OCFS on 64bit Windows Server 2003. I moved the databases to new servers and a new SAN at the same time with minimal downtime since they were 24/7 systems. The outage for each database during the move was about two hours on one day to get to the new SAN and then again two more hours another day the next week to get from 9i to 10g RAC. The 5 databases are accessed by dozens of web servers located in the hosting center which received thousands of hits per day from 140 countries around the clock.

In 2007, I moved on to BarclayCard US in Wilmington Delaware where I am a Senior Oracle Database Administrator. I manage a team of DBAs and the five of us make up the Database Engineering team. We manage and maintain 65 databases, mentor developers on their development projects, database upgrades and migrations, database maintenance and automation scripts, and production deployment and performance tuning activities. I continue to work with the business users to enable them to get the most of these informations and to reduce expenses and increase revenue for the bank on a daily basis.

The skills and experience I have received have poised me well for working with both technical and non-technical users, and for creating web sites and hosting database and web servers. I started DataToTheMax because I can use these skills and knowledge to help small businesses with their web sites and database systems at an affordable cost because I can provide the technical skills small businesses need without the expense and the overhead associated with large technology shops and service providers.

David Hansen

Create Your Badge