Authors

Charles Kim is an Oracle ACE and an Oracle Certified DBA. Charles is a freelance consultant and works predominately in the Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) space (RAC, ASM,Data Guard, and other HA solutions).

Charles released his first book, titled Oracle Database 11g New Features for DBA and Developers, in November 2007. Charles also co-authored the Linux Recipes for Oracle DBAs with APress, published in November 2008. Charles is also the author of the MAA case study at Oracle’s website.

He holds certifications in Oracle, Red Hat Linux, and Microsoft; has more than 18 years of IT experience; and has worked with Oracle since 1991. Charles blogs regularly on his DBAExpert.com website and provides technical solutions to Oracle DBAs and developers.

Joe Meeks is a Director of Product Management with Oracle’s Database High Availability Group in Server Technologies. Joe manages customer programs that focus on data protection and high availability solutions using Oracle Data Guard and the Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture. These programs ensure customer success through knowledge transfer of HA best practices while closely aligning future Oracle development priorities with customer requirements.

Joe has 30 years of experience in the computer industry helping customers to address HA requirements of business critical applications in manufacturing, retail, finance, energy, telecommunications, healthcare, and public sectors. He has a BS in Environmental Science and an MBA.

Michael Smith is Principle Member of the technical staff in Oracle’s Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) team in Server Technologies. Mike has been with Oracle for 10 years, previously serving as the Data Guard Global Technical Lead within Oracle Global Support. Mike’s current focus is developing, validating, and publishing HA best practices using Data Guard in an integrated fashion across all Oracle Database high availability features. His Data Guard technical specialties focus on network transport, recovery, role transitions, Active Data Guard, and client failover.

He has published a dozen MAA Best Practice papers for Oracle 9i, 10g, and 11g. He has been a contributing author to other Oracle Press publications. Mike has also been speaker at the previous three Oracle Open World events held in San Francisco. His “What They Didn’t Print in the DOC” best practice presentations covering Data Guard and MAA are a favorite among Oracle users, with attendance at the top of all Oracle Database technology presentations.

Nitin Vengurlekar, a consulting member of the technical staff at Oracle, is the author of Oracle Automatic Storage Management by Oracle Press. With more than 22 years of IT experience, including OS390 Systems Programming, UNIX Storage Administration, System and Database Administration, Nitin is a seasoned systems architect who has successfully assisted numerous customers to deploy highly available Oracle systems.

He has worked for Oracle for more than 14 years, currently in the Real Application Cluster (RAC) engineering group, with specific emphasis on ASM and storage. He has written many papers on ASM usage and deployments on various storage array architectures and serves as a writer and contributor to Oracle documentation as well as Oracle education material.

Sonya Carothers is a Senior Oracle Database Administrator at PDX, Inc. She has more than 24 years of IT experience in database administration and software development. Sonya has worked as a senior database administrator, IT manager, and technical consultant. She has worked with several relational databases and has been working with Oracle since 1994.

In addition, she has worked on a wide variety of projects in multi-platform environments. Her expertise includes high availability architecture, disaster recovery infrastructure, high performance database design, best practice database administration, and systems configuration.

Joydip Kundu is currently the Director of Development for Data Guard Logical Standby and LogMiner. Has been with Oracle since 1996 and is one of the original developers of Oracle LogMiner. Joydip is the architect of the log mining engine inside the Oracle RDBMS that underpins Data Guard Logical Standby, Streams Capture, and other redo-based features such as asynchronous Change Data Capture and Audit Vault.

Joydip holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Bill Burke is a Consulting Technical Director with Oracle’s System Performance and Architecture consulting practice. Over his 25 years in the IT industry over half of that has been committed to volunteer leadership roles. He has served on the board of directors of the International Oracle Users Group, International Oracle Users Council, Oracle Development Tools User Group, led the first and second IOUG/Oracle Database 10g beta test teams, and he has been an active participant on the public boards, forums, and Oracle mailing lists where he was known as the “Kinder and Gentler DBA”.

Most of his work today in the SP&A Practice is in best practice audits and the implementation and performance tuning of Maximum Availability Architectures including Real Application Clusters (RAC), Data Guard, and their management with Enterprise Manager Grid Control. Bill has been an OCP-certified DBA since version 7 of Oracle.

Mr. Burke is a Certified Flight Instructor - Instrument and has logged hundreds of hours as a commercial pilot and flight instructor over the years. In his free time away from Oracle, he is an accomplished professional photographer who works with local youth sports organizations, on a pro-bono basis, and specializes in scenic, wilderness and travel photography with an emphasis on endangered species.

You can reach him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .