My name is Steven Karam, and I am a 26 year old Oracle professional in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia.

I have been working with Oracle as a DBA for about 10 years now. I started programming when I was about 10 years old on an 8086 my aunt bought me. By the time I was in high school, I landed my first Oracle job as a DBA/Developer for Lambda Consulting building applications for SPAWAR.

A couple years later I quit Lambda and moved on to Logicon Syscon (now Northrop Grumman), where I worked for a couple years again as a DBA/Developer.

After I left there, I went to Trader Publishing Company, which is where my DBA career quickly took off. I had the opportunity to bring many additions to the Trader operations department, as I was noted as a ‘key player’ and was always part of the planning of any project. I recommended and helped implement dataguard, rman backups, monitoring, Oracle 10g, RAC + ASM, and even PHP for development. I worked there for three and a half years and gained a ton of experience in the process.

From there I decided to try my hand at teaching. I joined Oracle Corporation as a Sr. Instructor and began the life of a travelling teacher. I taught over 20 DBA classes and was the lead instructor for the Security series. While I was there, I maintained a student approval rating of 95% or higher and made Quality Club for each quarter I was there. In my third quarter I earned the Leadership Circle distinction, which was awarded to the top 3% of instructors. In addition, I was on a five man team that wrote, developed, and implemented the Oracle 10g Certified Masters exam, the highest credential an Oracle DBA can be awarded. Because of this, I was of course awarded the certification myself, and was the second Oracle 10g Certified Master in the world.

But the travel became a little much. I moved back to Trader Publishing and began as a Sr. DBA again, and once again began suggesting and implementing new ideas. We created an object oriented 10g database using substitutable types and nested tables that is mirrored by a highly scalable PHP5 solution using Zend Core for Oracle. I moved up to Database Manager and stayed there to the end.

While at Trader the second time around, catastrophe struck…one of our sites that I had never before worked on crashed, and hard. It lost a ton of data and seemed unrecoverable. During this time Mike Ault, a noted DBA professional and member of Burleson Oracle Consulting and Training, was called to the scene. We spent many nights fixing the problem and finally got them their site back.

AND, in addition, last but certainly not least…I am the father of two beautiful children and husband to the most perfect wife I could have ever asked for. I have a great and supporting family who have cheered me on all the way, and I owe them more than I could ever dream of having in this life.

Whew, and only 27 years old!