American DBA Online hosted another animated seminar on April 17, 2004, at the Clarion Hotel in Edison , New Jersey , with an audience of nearly 200 members and database professionals. It was a radiant, balmy day yielding relief to the long, cold winter. Despite the spectacular day, dedicated IT professionals chose to attend the seminar, not wanting to miss the high quality presentations DBA Online Seminar is reputed for offering.

Committee member Mr. Stan Ma, our host, kicked off the seminar. Mr. David Wang, DBA Online's Founder and President, provided Opening Remarks. David outlined the DBA Online's plans and activities for 2004. While continuing to host broad-spectrum seminars, DBA Online Committee launched a new endeavor in February this year organizing Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings. The first SIG meeting was an impressive success focused on Advanced Performance Tuning. More SIG meetings are planned for this year as well as some non-technical activities.

Four technical presentations on hot topics in database technology were delivered. First, Mr. Rick Pandya, a renowned instructor from Oracle Corporation and speaker at Oracle OpenWorld, provided the keynote speech: “Oracle 10g New Features for DBA – Part I”. The topic covered an overview of the Oracle's latest release 10g, which supports the concept of grid computing. His presentation was focused on the key features of self- management such as Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) and Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM). Since Oracle10g has a plethora of features, not all of them could be covered within an hour. However, Rick promised to come back again to present 10g-Part II.

Two presentations from sponsors identified helpful product offerings. Mr. Joe Weinman from Bradmark Technologies, the major sponsor for the Seminar, discussed “Online Reorganizations for Oracle Databases”. This is Bradmark's flagship product that allows data to be available to users while tables are being reorganized. Quest Software, who has been sponsoring the seminar for years, returned to present their latest product releases: TOAD, Spotlight and the new Quest Central – the unified tool embedding DBA modules, and other tools similar to TOAD.

Sr. DBA Steve Siew delivered the last presentation on “Backup and Recovery with Oracle 9i RMAN”. He presented architecture and features that can simplify the backup and recovery process. With his thorough knowledge and experience, he demonstrated step by step how to configure backup and database recovery using RMAN.

The fun quiz contest and raffle were hosted by Committee VP April Cai. April provided questions collected by the Committee and those who answered questions correctly were awarded gifts. The exciting raffle was sponsored by Bradmark and the lucky winner David Chu took home a popular iPod player. Winning or not, everyone took home something after the seminar: either knowledge gained from the technical presentations and quiz show, or camaraderie from networking with old and new friends, or both.

DBA Online Committee