Only a couple of years ago, I would never have thought I would start blogging. But, you know, as Forrest Gump’s mom said “Life’s a box of chocolates, Forrest. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

So, here I am… the first post…

Sticking to the topic “Never Say Never”, I would like to share with you how I ended up in this business. In the early nineties, I was a student in the department of Electrical Engineering at the Ecole d’ingénieurs de Fribourg. In my final year, I specialized in computer engineering. As a result, my professional interests were related to micro controllers and processors, operating systems (mainly Unix) and C/C++ programming languages. Basically, I hated only one thing in the IT-environment: database engines! At that time, I was introduced to Ingres on Sun 1 workstations. However, I don’t think this was the cause of the problem ;-) Anyway, at that time I promised to myself to stay away from database engines for the rest of my life. But, as I wrote before, never say never! After a short foray into Informix, I had my first contact with Oracle7 in 1995. Since then, I have been focussing on understanding how the Oracle database engine works and, therefore, how to correctly use it to leverage its power.