Rich Niemiec is the current Chief Innovation/Information Officer of Viscosity North America. He is an Oracle ACE Director, a world-renowned IT expert, and was a co-founder and the CEO of TUSC, a Chicago-based systems integrator of Oracle-based business solutions started in 1988. Rich has served as President of Rolta TUSC and Rolta EICT. TUSC was the Oracle Partner of the Year in 2002, 2004, 2007, 2008, 2010, & 2011 (Rolta TUSC). Rich is the past President of the International Oracle Users Group (IOUG) and the current President of the Midwest Oracle Users Group (MOUG). Rich is in the Chicago & E&Y National Entrepreneur Hall of Fame.
Jorge Rimblas is an APEX Technical Lead at DRW. He is an Oracle ACE and has been an Oracle Database professional since 1995. His areas of expertise include Oracle Application Express (APEX), Oracle e-Business Suite, Oracle databases, and Oracle’s development technologies. He started using APEX when it was known as HTML DB, starting with version 1.6 Since 2008; APEX is all he does. He has taught APEX to dozens of people and been a speaker at the RMOUG Training Days, Great Lakes Oracle Conference (GLOC), East Coast Oracle Users Conference (ECO), UTOUG Training Days, ODTUG Kscope and Oracle OpenWorld conferences. Jorge has helped several companies, in diverse industries, bring their requirements to life in the form of creative solutions. In addition to his UI and Theme experience, he is an avid problem solver that thrives in finding elegant and efficient solutions.
Jorge can be found on Twitter as @rimblas and his blog rimblas.com/blog
Jeff Smith is a product manager on the Oracle Database team, specializing in database tools. He blogs at thatjeffsmith.com and tweets as @thatjeffsmith.
Sean Scott has worked with Oracle technologies since 1995, specializing in RAC/MAA, Engineered Systems, migrations and upgrades, systems reliability and resilience, and performance tuning. His interests include DevOps, automation, cloud computing, containers, TFA/AHF, virtualization, and Infrastructure as Code. Sean is a regular presenter at conferences and webinars including Collaborate, Oracle OpenWorld, RMOUG, and UTOUG. He serves on the boards of the Utah Oracle User Group and Real Applications Special Interest Group and is a member of the Database Technology Committee for Collaborate/IOUG. He’s a champion of emerging technologies like Docker and containers, virtualization, automation, Cloud computing, and distributed systems. Sean is an Oracle ACE and Oracle Certified Specialist and blogs at https://oraclesean.com.
Nitin Vengurlekar is the Oracle Public Sector Chief Technology Strategist, with Thought Leadership, Sales Enablement, and Full-stack implementation architect, as the primary responsibilities
Nitin sits on the curriculum board for the following colleges:
– Collin College – Computer Systems/Web & Mobile Applications Advisory Committee
– Dallas Community Colleges (DCCCD) – Cloud curriculum Advisory Board
Prior to joining Oracle, Nitin Vengurlekar was the co-founder and CTO of Viscosity North America
Nitin, an Oracle ACE Director and also a VMware vExpert, is a well-known Oracle technologist and speaker in the areas of Oracle Storage, high availability, Oracle RAC, and private database cloud. He is the author of Oracle Automatic Storage Management, Exadata Handbook, and the Data Guard Handbook. He has written many papers on storage, database tuning, and served as a contributor to Oracle documentation as well as Oracle education material.
Joel R. Kallman, Oracle Senior Director, Software Development
Jessica Sharp is a managing consultant with EnterpriseDB who stays involved in her local database user groups and helps organize Python and other programming events nationwide. For almost 10 years of her pre-open source life, she was an independent Oracle consultant specializing in data migrations and the cloud until Postgres caught her attention and EnterpriseDB beamed her up. She enjoys technical challenges and values bringing customer perspectives into practical and engineered solutions.
Cary Millsap is an entrepreneur, writer, teacher, designer, developer, consultant, and software performance specialist. He has presented at hundreds of events around the world. His innovations and teaching have influenced thousands of professionals. Mr. Millsap is the owner and president of Method R Corporation.
He is the author of “The Method R Guide to Mastering Oracle Trace Data” and the lead designer of the Method R Workbench software suite. He wrote the book “Optimizing Oracle Performance,” for which he and colleague Jeff Holt were named Oracle Magazine’s 2004 Authors of the Year. He is published in professional journals including “Communications of the ACM.”
Sarah Craynon Zumbrum is a Principal Architect for Oracle with over 15 year’s experience as an Oracle customer (end-user and technology administrator), partner (senior through lead consultant), and associate. As an Oracle ACE Director (Alumni), she is focused on solving problems using technology and educating those around her, whether they be colleagues, junior colleagues, or conference attendees. She has presented at all the major North American Oracle technical user group conferences and many of the regional ones in order to educate those using the tools or those interested in what Oracle Analytics offers. She was formerly a member of ODTUG’s Board of Directors and also served on ODTUG’s Hyperion SIG Board of Directors. Sarah has been published in RMOUG’s SQL>Update magazine and ODTUG’s Technical Journal. She was also profiled by Oracle in Oracle Magazine in November 2015. Her specialties include Essbase, BI, Data Visualization, Machine Learning, AI, and Data Management. She is an avid triathlete who resides in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Liron Amitzi is an Oracle ACE Director and a senior Oracle DBA consultant, with more than 20 years of experience. During these years Liron worked as a senior consultant with a large number of companies in various fields and managed an Oracle Professional Services Team. He mainly specializes in high availability solutions, performance, backup and recovery, and other infrastructure and application database areas.
Liron is the president of BCOUG (British Columbia Oracle User Group), and he is also a well-known instructor and lectures in Oracle courses, events, and forums.
Heli Helskyaho is the CEO of Miracle Finland Oy. Heli holds a Master’s degree (Computer Science) at the University of Helsinki and she specializes in databases. At the moment she is working on her doctoral studies, researching and teaching at the University of Helsinki. Her research areas cover Big Data, multi-model databases, schema discovery, and methods and tools for utilizing semi-structured data for decision making.
Heli has been working on IT since 1990. She has been in several positions but every role has always included databases and database designing. Heli believes that understanding your data makes using the data much easier.
Heli is an Oracle ACE Director, and Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador, and a frequent speaker in many conferences. She is the author of Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler for Database Design Mastery (Oracle Press 2015) and a co-author of Real World SQL and PL/SQL: Advice from the Experts (Oracle Press 2016).
Heli was listed as one of the TOP 100 influences on the IT sector in Finland in 2015, in 2016, in 2017, in 2018, and again in 2019.
Karen Cannell is President of TH Technology, a consulting firm focused on Oracle technology. Karen is an ACE Director, ODTUG Board member, APEX gal, frequent user group volunteer, and conference presenter. She can be reached at kcannell@thtechnology.com and on Twitter at @thtechnology
Jim Czuprynski has nearly four decades of professional experience in his career in information technology, serving diverse roles at several Fortune 1000 companies before becoming an Oracle DBA in 2001. He has been an Oracle ACE Director in 2014 and is a sought-after public speaker on Oracle Database technology features, presenting often at Oracle OpenWorld, COLLABORATE, ODTUG Kaleidoscope, Oracle CODE events, Oracle Development Community tours, and Oracle User Group conferences around the world.
Jim has authored 100+ articles on Oracle Database administration, ML/analytics, and APEX since 2003 at databasejournal.com, IOUG SELECT, and ODTUG TechCeleration and has co-authored four books on Oracle database technology. Jim’s blog, Generally … It Depends (https://jimczuprynski.wordpress.com), contains his regular observations on all things Oracle and the state of the IT industry.
Over the past ten years, Chris Saxon has worked as an Oracle developer, DBA, and architect. During this time he’s built up a passion for interacting with data using SQL and helping others do the same. Combining this with a love of games and quizzes, Chris started the Database Design quiz on the PL/SQL Challenge in 2013. He’s looking forward to helping spread the word about SQL so that people get the most out of their data. He and Connor McDonald now form the backbone of the Ask Tom Answer Team, with Oracle Database product managers and developers also pitching in around their areas of expertise.
Alfredo Abate has been using Oracle technologies since 1999. He is currently the President of the Chicago Oracle Users Group (COUG) and President of the Oracle RAC SIG. He has presented at numerous conferences and user group events such as COUG, NCOAUG, GLOC, OATUG, MOUS, Collaborate, and Kscope. For his Oracle community contributions, he was awarded with the Oracle ACE designation. He currently works for a manufacturing company in the suburbs of Chicago where he is responsible for and enjoys working with a full suite of Oracle technologies.
Kim Berg Hansen is a database developer from Middelfart in Denmark. Originally wanting to work with electronics, he almost coincidentally tried computer programming and discovered where his talent lay, as the programs he did work well – unlike the electronics projects he soldered that often failed. After that experience, he progressed from Commodore Basic on VIC-20 over Modula-2 and C at Odense University to Oracle SQL and PL/SQL, which last two languages he now has worked with extensively since the year 2000. His professional passion is to work with data inside the database utilizing the SQL language to the fullest to achieve the best application experience for the users.
Kim shares his experience and knowledge by writing the Practical Oracle SQL book, blogging, presenting at various Oracle User Group conferences, and being the SQL quizmaster at the Oracle Dev Gym. His motivation is when peers go “now I understand” after his explanations, or when end users “can’t live without” his application coding. He is certified Oracle OCE in SQL as well as awarded Oracle ACE Director. Outside the coding world, Kim is married, loves to cook, and is a card-carrying member of the Danish Beer Enthusiasts association.
Steven Feuerstein is an expert on the Oracle PL/SQL language, having written ten books on PL/SQL, including Oracle PL/SQL Programming and Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices (all published by O’Reilly Media). Steven has been developing software since 1980, spent five years with Oracle back in the “old days” (1987-1992), and was PL/SQL Evangelist for Quest Software (and then Dell) from January 2001 to February 2014 – at which point he returned joyfully to Oracle Corporation. He was one of the original Oracle ACE Directors and writes regularly for Oracle Magazine, which named him the PL/SQL Developer of the Year in both 2002 and 2006. He is also the first recipient of ODTUG’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2009).