What does it feel to be twenty?

One day is a very long time if you have to wait for something to happen. Twenty years are as fast as a wink of an eye if you keep on making things happen.

The 80's, the Glowing Decade

Back in the 80's talking about mobile phones was not popular at all. The cassio fx100 was my programmable scientific calculator used to solve integrals by means of numerical methods. In the music, Madonna, Billy Joel, Elton John, Cindy Lauper, Aerosmith, Brian Adams, Dire Straits, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Peter Gabriel, Huey Lewis & the news, Robert Palmer, Bruce Springsteen, Survivor, Tears for Fears, Van Halen, ZZ Top, only to name a few, were the singers we used to hear with the walkMan (some sort of iPod of the 80's) wich was our preferred music gadget to play audio tapes.
At that time the fluorescent pink, yellow, green and blue were the fashion colors found in every guard robe. People dressed in those colors easily glowed in the night with the Discotheque lights. These noisy colors still survive today only as text markers.
At that time Java was an Island found in the Pacific Ocean and Cobol was still the programming language for the business applications. Meanwhile Pascal was an emerging structured programming language which mostly remained in the research labs. Most of the people related to informatics at the time felt in love with Pascal but ended married with C Language until the word Java changed its widely known meaning to the programming language for the internet.

20 Years of professional Career devoted to Oracle

Oracle has been evolving and it is as challenging, aggressive and innovative as the first time I met it. It was Oracle version 5.0 the first Oracle version I used to issue my first SQL statements. 16 Mb RAM, two hard disks of 512 Mb and 320Mb inside an HP9000 runnig HPUX 9.0 were the leading edge technology standards capable of carrying the data payload required to move the Metropolitan University data. Today this amount of computer power is hilarious, but if compared with the average PC of the time (640K RAM + Extended memory + 40Mb HD + 256 Colors monitor) this was a powerful Server.
My professional career has evolved side by side with Oracle. I have run at the same pace Oracle runs, stuck to it as its shadow. During this time I have seen a lot of people come and go to the Oracle community, and very few of them still join me today. Even though very few things have changed. The two main Kernel directives were not very different from today's kernel directives,
I. High Availability
II. High Performance
Oracle is conceived as a highly fault tolerate rdbms, whose memory and physical structures provide a good balance between recoverability and performance. I have met all the major and minor releases since then up to the latest available 11g release today and I can say that even though Oracle's main directives are the same, each day it becomes more robust and more complex.
It's been a long journey that has run at a very fast pace. I have met a lot of people, I have met a lot of places. And at the end here I am still working with Oracle. I enjoy this professional activity as much as the first time I met Oracle, it's been some sort of falling in love at the first sight that has ended in a marriage so fresh and new as the first time.
This is the train of a never ending trip where a lot of people climb up and others descend from it, but the most important part of it is the trip itself, not the destination.