What I do

I’m an Oracle Database Reliability Engineer with interests in Real Application Clusters, Exadata and Engineered Systems, Trace File Analyzer, Oracle Cloud, and performance tuning. I automate things and enjoy working at the intersection of databases and DevOps/SRE. Some of my colleagues will tell you my go-to solution for just about anything is to “build it with Docker.”

I work alongside a talented group of Oracle ACEs at Viscosity North America as a Principal Consultant and have the opportunity to share my experience with the community through presentations and webinars and through my YouTube Channel. See my projects on GitHub, including repos for running Data Guard and Sharded databases on Docker.

It all started when…

Years ago I was working as an Oracle developer. At the company holiday party I was pointing people out for my wife so she could put faces to the coworkers I talked about.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

It was one of our DBAs. She asked what a DBA did and I explained that it was a horrible, awful job. They worked ridiculous hours and everyone hated them because they were the ones that told people “No.”

“I’ll never be a DBA” I told her.

A few weeks later our DBAs left for lucrative consulting gigs. The manager assigned DBA duties to me and another developer while they looked for replacements. Except they didn’t. They never hired anyone.

Rather than doing development and DBA work and not getting paid for either, I took a new job as… a DBA. That was in 1996 and I haven’t looked back. Turns out I love being a DBA and my wife loves to remind me not to say “never.”

The origin of “Oracle Sean”

That same shop had two Seans and two Bobs in IT. Two of us worked with Oracle, two of us worked at the help desk. When people were told they needed to see Sean or Bob in IT, it was always prefixed with the group.

Help Desk Bob. Oracle Bob. Help Desk Sean.

Oracle Sean.

It stuck.