1. DATABASE AS A CAREER Sameer Kumar - Profile: DB Consultant, Ashnik Pte Ltd, Singapore - Education: Bachelor of Tech., Nirma University, India

2. WHO?  Who should opt for a career in Databases?  Do you like normalization?  Do you love diving into a huge relational query?  Get me the salary of all the employees who earn more than the average salary of the company  Or get me all those who were joined in the year when maximum no of employees were hired?  Do you like looking at performance graph ?  Do you like waking up to a call which makes you rush to office?

3. HOW ?  You have various choices when it comes to nurturing a career in Databases  You can be the guy looking after massive data centers: Mr. DBA  You can be the guy who asks too many questions to the developers: Mr. DB Designer  You can be the person who designs the whole solution: Mr. DB Architects  Database developer (yeah it’s different from being a java developer)  Freelance consultant  DB Specialist:  DB Performance Engineer  DB HA Engineer  DB Integration Expert  DB Monitoring expert  But gradually the roles are expanding and are overlapping now a days

4. WHAT DO YOU NEED TO KNOW?  Skills differ vastly from kind of role you are working in  Over lapping roles: know a bit of everything  DB Concepts:  Various design standard: need and over head (e.g. Normalization)  Database Objects  Basic programming logic  OS and system basics, e.g. I/O, network etc  Memory requirements  Process model of OS  Database over all functioning

5. WHICH DATABASE?  The dilemma, which database shall I go for a big name like Oracle or shall I go for growing market segment or shall I go for Open Source?  Wait there is noSQL as well!  What about cloud?  Well all I will say  Keep your fundamentals clear  Keep yourself flexible: the World is shifting from Big Brands to “ROI”  Adopt open source! Get Cloud!

6. NEW CHALLENGES  Increasing cost of IT maintenance  Increasing need of being agile  Do I need to worry about noSQL?  How can you be prepared  noSQL: is not replace but a complementing technology  Cloud: be agile and flexible  Open Source and open standards: what you learn is generic

7. WILL I GET A JOB AS A DB GUY?  Yes you will get! Plus you have many options to specialize and groom your career...

8. IS DB IMPORTANT IF I WANT TO HAVE A DIFFERENT CAREER?  Yes  Security experts need to secure databases too (more than anything else)  Performance engineers need to analyze the db performance as well  Application Architects needs to do db design as well  Developers do write queries

9. IS BEING A DB GUY CHALLENGING ENOUGH?  Trust me, it is!

10. TRAINING RESOURCES  Every database has huge repository of resources which you can browse  Contact Abyres (http://www.abyres.net/), our local partner for training on PostgreSQL Databasehttp://www.abyres.net/  Bulk courses for University Student  Organize workshop for Redhat and PostgreSQL at your University  Participate in user groups e.g. Postgres User group, register on EnterpriseDB website  Join/Create Meetup groups and attend/organize events Best way to learn is to socialize with other learners

11. IF ANY OF THOSE NEEDS MY ASSISTANCE  Sameer.kumar@Ashnik.com Sameer.kumar@Ashnik.com  I tweet at @Sameerkasi200x