"You know, if the U.S.S.R. had Oracle and some decent computing power, they'd never have lost the cold war. A small number of people could run a very large gulag."it brought memories about how i got to work with Oracle, memories going all the way back to USSR.
I started to study Mathematics at Uzhgorod National University, Ukraine in year 1988. After couple of years of generic mathematics we finally get to specialty computer courses, one of which was Databases led by Professor Jozsef Holovacz (Головач Йосип Гнатович). At that time the course was based on dBASE III and dBASE IV, later we had chance to learn FoxPro and Clipper. And i remember at one of lecture Prof. Golovach mentioned ORACLE - relational database from USA, and with very intriguing voice made statement that maybe somebody will be lucky to work with ORACLE if embargo is lifted from USSR. That's how i first heard about ORACLE and built association to it as "forbidden fruit".
Fast forward few years and in year 1998 i was asked to substitute Prof. Holovach, while he went to Hungary. I had to teach young students course for Databases and Knowledge Bases at Uzhgorod State Institute of Informatics, Economics and Law. Not much changed since i studied, there were no dBASE anymore, but still FoxPro; and for Knowledge bases we used PROLOG. And at one of lectures it was my turn to intrigue my students with same statement - that if you study hard and get lucky maybe you get chance to work with ORACLE.
Fast forward to year 2001 and being director of IT department at ISP UkrNet and after our in-house custom built solution for Billing and Accounting started to choke due to workload i was sent to Moscow, Russia to Billing and Telecommunications conference with task to find new software for Billing and Accounting. While there were dozens of different solution providers one of them - Absolut from ServoComp - stood out.
It was ORACLE based!
My heart was captured immediately. And in summer 2002 we started implementation of Absolut at ISP UkrNet. At one of the smoke breaks ServoComp consultant started discussion about ORACLE Express products for reporting and analytics, so i very confidently interrupt him and said that ORACLE is just a database.
"With all due respect, colleague, but you are wrong!" said consultant and continued that ORACLE has even its own accounting system - Oracle Financials.
Since then "Colleague" became such a buzz word for me that during AT&T project in Atlanta, Georgia one senior manager asked for me using statement "Where is that consultant that calls everybody Colleague?".
And it was first time i heard about Oracle Financials. Later in 2003 i started new job as junior consultant for Oracle Applications, but that's another story...
