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Andy Mendelsohn
Breaking new ground is old hat for Oracle's long-time visionary database developer
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DATABASE TECHNOLOGISTS once proudly held the
notion that the monolithic, centralized platform was
good; widely distributed, decentralized databases
were bad. While Oracle has put itself at the sharp
end of the stick when it comes to beating off those
days of old, it takes a sense of humor to hold on to
an icon of that bygone era, namely a slightly cracked
20-pound pig statue that survived the 1989 Loma
Prieta earthquake.
Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president at Oracle's
server technologies division in Redwood Shores,
Calif., has developed groundbreaking work on Oracle's
database products. Mendelsohn's list of credits
includes the Oracle B-tree indexing code that
provides crash recovery in Oracle databases,
row-level locking, and multiversion concurrency control mechanisms. He was
one of the primary developers behind the Oracle SQL query processing engine,
and he co-designed Oracle's PL/SQL stored procedure language.
Each achievement marked a significant turning point for the company that, in
the 1980s and into the 1990s, wrestled with changing from monolithic
database design to an architecture that supports client/server computing.
Mendelsohn spent his first days at Oracle in 1984 implementing SQL
subqueries and optimizing Version 4 of the Oracle database. From there he
got involved in developing stored procedure languages, co-developing PL/SQL,
and tackling the radical notion of preconsistency.
"People thought we were crazy," Mendelsohn says. The complex task of
multiversioning data and developing the B-trees indexing technology became
the "most challenging and most difficult" part of his career.
The pig as a metaphor for monolithic database development emerged in 1985
when Sybase entered the market with technology that leveraged client/server
computing. Until then, the world was relatively peaceful. "Oracle ran on minis,
IBM on the mainframe. We didn't compete." But "in the early '90s Oracle was
virtually in a financial ruin. Sybase almost put us out of businesses,"
Mendelsohn explains.
The key to turning back the Sybase tide was found in the code. "What we
had done at Oracle was design the programming aspect of PL/SQL after a
modern programming language," Mendelsohn says. As such, PL/SQL was used
to write Oracle's ERP applications, forming a common foundation it now
markets as contributing to its database and application server's
interoperability.
Security became a key feature of the 2001 release of Oracle9i Database and
Application Server, marketed under the "unbreakable" slogan. Despite a flaw
recently exposed by a U.K. security firm, Mendelsohn says that Oracle does
not treat security as "an afterthought." He points to the RAC (Real Application
Cluster) technology as a sign of its top-down approach, in which security is
built in to the browser interface, the application server, and the database.
Meanwhile, as Mendelsohn looks to the future, one of the interesting trends
will be the use of XML as the "standard for describing language over the
Internet."
"On the content management side we think a lot of the content is XML. Apps
will be generating XML content," Mendelsohn says. "We think the database is
going to become the repository for all information."
Correction
In this article, we misreported which version of the Oracle database Andy
Mendelsohn worked on optimizing. He worked on Version 5.
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Back to 2002 Technology Innovators
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Profile |
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| Andy Mendelsohn - The Oracle9i leader sees XML in the database of the future. |
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Current position - Senior vice president, Oracle server technologies division |
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Age - 46 |
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Technology prediction - "NAS and SAN technology will support Oracle's RAC
technology. I think blade servers will also become dominant in the
datacenter." |
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Hall of fame 2002 - Several industry icons join InfoWorld's Innovators Hall of Fame |
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Ones to Watch 2002 - These up-and-comers are developing the technologies that will matter most in the coming months |
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Where are they now? - Since the 2000 Ones to Watch were named, many dot-coms imploded and the economy
soured. How have these technological talents fared? |
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