I'm at Giant Eagle right now. Great place to work. A lot more high-tech than I thought. When my fellow Oracle instructors found out I was going back to work as a "real DBA", they were teasing me about going to a "supermarket". Well, I found out that it takes a LOT of technology to sell tomatoes.

First day I showed up here I thought I was going to show the Giant Eagle folks a thing-or-two. The very first person I met here asked me to help him tune a statement run from a multi-tier application, accessing a 5 billion row table and stored in a database running on a Regatta 24 CPU server.

Query was numerous pages long and COMPLEX. Kid looked about 20 something. He scanned the query for about 5 to 10 minutes and said "I'm thinking the problem's in this nested subselect here." That was the first time he ever saw that statement! Geez, I didn't even get past the first part of the query.

He was absolutely correct and I thought to myself "you have to be kidding me...."

Found out that the Giant Eagle applications are every bit as challenging, complex and effectively administered as the ones I worked on at Alcoa and Mellon Bank. And those two companies knew how to choose and implement technology. I was very happy to find out that Giant Eagle was on a technical par with them.

Still miss the Oracle instructor part. Some of the developers here ask me a question and we end up with a three hour discussion on a white board. Trying to break myself of that habit. Same reason why my blogs are LOOOOONNGGG..