May 8, 2024 • 25 mins
You might know Martin Bach from his current role of talking about the new JavaScript engine in Oracle Database 23ai. But long before that, Martin has been a well respected professional in the Oracle community, with many a DBA being in debt to his knowledge and assistance.
In this episode, Martin and I talk about the beginnings of his Oracle career and how we had a lot in common with our experiences in the United Kingdom, even working for the same company at some point.
If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
G'day, everyone.
My name's Connor McDonald.
Welcome to The Spoken Nerd,
the podcast about database technology.
In today's episode, or this will probablydraw into several episodes,
I'm delighted to have a chat to a goodfriend of mine named Martin Bach.
Martin lives in the UK.
Sorry, he lives in Europe.
I shouldn't say the UK.
I'm getting ahead of myself.
We're going to talk about the UK in asecond.
(00:23):
Martin lives in Europe.
We've met each other many times atconferences over the past,
but this is the first time we've done apodcast together. Welcome,
Martin. Hey,
Conor. Thank you very much for having me.
Now I have to ask,
this won't be useful for people on thepodcast,
but what is your virtual background?
Is that Doctor Who or Star Wars or StarTrek?
Well,
a long time ago, like when I was 15 or so,
(00:46):
I started enjoying watching Star Trek andI started out with Next Generation
and the follow up to that eventuallybecame Voyager.
And the bridge you can see is CaptainJaneway's bridge and
Voyager is great because it's drawn outover seven seasons,
lots of episodes and it's good fun to
watch. And I quite like The Voyager.
It's funny,
I grew up, I shouldn't show my age, I grewup with the original
(01:07):
Star Trek as a very young child.
And it's really embarrassing because I wasso young.
We'd watch it with my parents on a Sundaynight.
And every time some sort of alien camealong, I was literally terrified.
You know, most nights I'd be ending up inthe parents'
bedroom saying, you know, I'm havingnightmares, etc.
And then you fast forward 40 years and youfind these old episodes on YouTube.
And it's these people with paper machemasks,
(01:30):
and they've been spray painted green.
And it's just like,
it literally is like watching a comedyshow. And I'm sitting there as a child,
because we'd only recently got colour TV,
the ability for a child to just immersethemselves in this world of
make believe. And it's just somewhatembarrassing now, because my mother still
even to this day enjoys pointing out theseold Star Trek things going,
and you used to be scared of that.
(01:51):
Anyway, I shouldn't digress into Star Trekbecause the Star Wars
fans will be up against me or the StarTrek fans will be up against me once
we start talking about who is the betterCaptain Kirk and the like.
Now correct me if I'm wrong,
are you of German descent?
I am indeed and I do live in Germany.
But as you said,
I've lived in the UK for a fair bit.
We first met in the UK and I use met ininverted commas
(02:11):
because our paths crossed via a companywhich we'll talk about shortly.
But before we get into that,
what took you to the UK when you first gotwhen you first moved there? In fact, when
did you move to the UK? That must havebeen 2006,
but that wasn't the first time I've been.
So I went to a university which requiredpeople to do an internship.
And as an alternative,
(02:32):
you could do a semester at one of thepartner uni's.
And because I wanted to improve mylanguage skills at the time,
I was in year four or so at uni,
we could go to Staffordshire University,
which is kind of between Birmingham andManchester.
and i did one semester there because ididn't do an international degree like
some of my friends who accompanied me buti was there for half a year and
(02:55):
i really really liked it i mean i'm sayingthat because we
were at stoke campus which was the lastporsche
and Stoke and Trent at the time saw somestruggling with
the decline of the major industry overthere.
It was my best semester,
I have to say, hands down,
because it was so much fun.
Because there were students fromeverywhere, Italy,
(03:17):
France, Spain,
and the international students always hungout.
And I thought this was a great experience.
I'd like to repeat that at some point.
So I started working after coming back, Istarted to work locally.
And then I thought,
you know, I'm now 20 odd years old. And ifI don't do a few years abroad,
I probably settle down and won't do it.That was the best thing that I met
the owner of the company we'll talk aboutshortly and we had phone interviews and
(03:41):
had never been to the place and I've nevermet the guy and I just signed more
or less on the spot and then I went thereafter they were moving offices.
They just moved offices. I met them on aweekend and we had
a lovely night out on Saturday in Brightonand it was just
marvelous and I said yeah it was a bit ofa risk but it paid out in the
Oh that's fantastic.
(04:02):
It's funny actually like I'm from on apersonal note I'm really thrilled to hear
you say that because my son Max is in hissecond year of
university and he's just transitioned fromhis existing course he's starting to
be a lawyer let's not put that against himbut he's starting to be a lawyer but he's
just transitioned into a different part ofthe degree course now which gives him an
honours degree but part of that is you doa six month overseas assignment
(04:23):
at another university and the universitysets it up for him so he gets
pretty much to choose where he wants togo.
But it's always heartening to hear otherpeople who have done these things
where they've gone abroad on a whim or anexperiment.
I've almost never heard anyone come backgoing,
yeah, that was a mistake.
Most people, it's just a great way ofbroadening your mind.
Well, I have to admit,
when I went to the UK,
it was in 1999.
And I would love to say it was part of myuniversity course, but no,
(04:46):
I'd been out of the workforce for maybe abit longer than that.
But it's funny, I went to the UK,
I hate to admit,
for solely financial reasons in the sensethat it was just before Y2K.
And of course, we were told that there wasjust contract
work coming out of the rafters every UK.
And that was
We could literally,
my wife and I at the time,
we could literally pick a place we wantedto live.
(05:06):
It's like, oh, let's go see this place.And then we find a
job and then you can find somewhere elseto live and find a job.
It was just fantastic.
And I'll happily concede.
I went there thinking, this is going to bea great way to make money.
I didn't really care about broadening mymind or seeing the world.
And my wife said, no,
we're traveling because we want to see theworld and prove ourselves.
And she was right.
I was very much like,
let's just get one contract, stay there,not move around.
(05:28):
And she was like, no, let's exploreEurope.
And we had contracts,
even in English speaking parts of France,we had a contract there, mainly in the UK,
one in Italy. And it was just probably thebest decision I've ever made.
And one of those jobs was, in fact,
one of the first jobs I had was at a placecalled Royal Sun Alliance,
which is in Horsham near Gatwick Airport.
And the reason I got that job is the DBAthat was there was a woman named Lisa.
(05:49):
You and I both know it. And she wasleaving the job.
She said, I'm leaving a job to form acompany.
I'm going to form a company.
It's going to be a remote databaseconsultancy company,
which of course nowadays is the norm,
because it was a big thing in those daysbecause the
internet was still fledging. In fact,
most of our stuff was dial-up.
How did you get involved with eDBA?
Was it just literally that random phonecall or what made you find them?
(06:11):
I don't remember which job site it wasexactly,
but I just browsed for available DBAroles,
which was what I was interested in at thetime.
And one of them was for EDBA.
And they said, yeah,
we do this and that. And it's all remote,
not quite as much travel,
which is nice.
So you've got more time to yourself ortravel when you want to travel.
(06:31):
And they also had the name of, you know,
this famous Connor McDonald on theirwebsite who works with them.
I thought, you know,
I don't think I had any fame then or nowfor that matter.
Well,
it certainly rang a big bell for me.
If Conor is working there, it can't bethat bad.
So that's how we got into phoneinterviews.
I think we did two or three phoneinterviews and they
(06:53):
offered me the job and that was inBrighton.
And like I said,
I've signed,
I've not seen Brighton.
But the other jobs that were on offer,
they were kind of further up north,
which is something I have a problem withbecause I've been at the union.
I quite like the accent from kind of theMidlands and further up.
And well,
(07:14):
it was just pure coincidence.
They were the fastest to have an offer outand that's how I signed.
And then, of course,
they said, you know, ah,
this thing on the website with Connor,
he's already moved on.
But that was no problem.
The guys were, I mean,
I've never felt so welcome.
And yeah,
well, we talk about that later. So I don'twant to jump ahead.
I have to admit, it's
(07:35):
It's funny you should say that, as I said,
I was joining Royal Sun Alliance to workas a DBA and Lisa was moving on.
But very quickly,
even though I was still working with RSA,
I found myself doing a little bit of adhoc work for EDBA
simply because they were just really nicepeople.
In those days,
they literally were working out of thebedroom.
They had a few staff members.
Each one had a bedroom each in which theyhad converted to a study.
(07:57):
And as I said,
most of the remote monitoring we did,
well, the only network access companies
would allow in those days was outgoingemail.
So we'd literally,
my job at EDBA was to write a bundle loadof shell scripts.
I'd be embarrassed to look at themnowadays,
but a bundle of shell scripts that we ranon each customer service,
it would bundle up all this usefulinformation and literally send emails to
(08:17):
us. And we had a little process internallythat would simply pick
those emails off and try convert it intoimportant things.
Still, I really enjoyed that concept ofseeing
someone in that sort of entrepreneur mode.
A lot of us in IT think, oh yes,
you know, if we could form a startup,
we'd go great guns. But I think it takes afair bit of courage. And
I was always impressed with Lisa inparticular who just said,
yeah, we're starting with nothing.
(08:38):
We've got a modem to the house inBrighton.
And so that'll be enough to get up andrunning.
So did you, when you moved to the UK,
did you move to Brighton itself? Did youlive in Brighton?
Just off Brighton,
I mean it's still Brighton,
but Preston Park.
That was also after I think I moved threeor four times.
It was a little bit hard to get to get aplace in the first place because
(08:59):
at the time you needed a bank account tobe able to rent something.
But in order to get a bank account,
you needed to have a residential address.
I remember that catch-22.
Yeah, that was a little tricky. Until Ifound a place where they said, yeah,
we'll give you a bank account based onyour passport.
And that was it.
And then everything sprung into place.
But, you know, Brighton is pretty busy,lots of students.
(09:21):
So finding a place to rent was a bittougher than I expected.
And I ended up moving a few times,
but I moved out to Preston Park,
which is the last stop before Brighton, ifyou go on the main line.
And that is exactly the place to be, in myopinion,
because Brighton station and everythingaround Brighton
station towards the seafront getsincredibly busy,
especially over summer months.
(09:42):
And it's, you know, lots of partygoers andit doesn't always look
quite so neat and tidy on a Monday whenyou walk into the office.
So Preston Park was the place to be.
It used to be that place from Brightonwhere you'd be walking near the train
station at night and you'd see half akebab.
And you'd wonder if that was the eatenkebab or the uneaten part.
But either way, we generally not the mostpalatable things.
(10:03):
Not that I want to turn this tech talkinto a
tourism thing. But when it comes toBrighton,
you and I both do share a place that weabsolutely love.
There's a tapas place in Brighton and isit shipping lanes?
Is that the name of the Soviet?
It's the it's the lanes,
as opposed to the north lanes,
not to be confused.
But it's in the lanes. Yes.
So yeah, so anyone listen to this podcast,if you're ever in Brighton,
(10:23):
Is it Carzadel?
Carzadon Carlos.
Carzadon Carlos.
You heard it here first.
Simply the best tapas place.
10 years ago when my partner and I startedthe English channel,
the first thing we did when we got back toEngland was
we went to the tapas place and had tapasthere.
It was absolutely fantastic.
Do you keep in touch with any of the EDBApeople?
I kind of lost contact with most of
(10:45):
them. So I'm still connected with themover LinkedIn.
But you know,
a lot of them have
Edba then eventually got acquired, I thinka couple of times or so,
and most of the people I used to work withat the time,
they have done other things,
but they were absolutely the best crowd tocrash into,
so to say.
And they were so welcoming and
(11:07):
totally different culture to what I wasused to before.
So I used to work after university.
I went to work in Luxembourg,
which is well known for its financialindustry and people there were huge.
And, you know,
that goes back 20 years now.
Everyone wears a suit,
everyone wears a tie,
proper shoes to match the outfit and itwas all very formal.
(11:29):
And at the end of the day,
everyone would just go home.
Whereas at EDBA,
over a short amount of time,
I became friends with most of them, Iguess, and then with everyone.
on a Friday,
we would go out to the pub and have a beeror two to celebrate the end of the week.
And that was just such a great experience.
And I wouldn't want to miss that.
You mentioned Luxembourg. I have to admit,
(11:50):
obviously, before we got in the podcast,
I did my usual LinkedIn stalking.
I won't talk about your time inLuxembourg, but I did see one of the
companies you worked for said IG EFI.
What does that stand for?
I'm just curious.
It's French.
So what it means is they build softwarefor fund accounting.
(12:13):
So essentially, if you're a big bank andyou're maintaining funds,
over the course of the day,
you would get all the trades that havebeen made that would get into the system
and you click a button at four o'clock inthe afternoon and
it calculates the net value of yourassets.
And that gets then sent to the variousstock exchanges where these are listed.
That was really a really, really goodexperience because
(12:36):
that's one of the few places I have seenwhere they did development
right for what was right at the time.
They used all the business logicprocessing inside the database,
which I thought was awesome.
So they had packages and I don't know howmany,
they even exceeded the size of a package.
So it was eventually became package andthen package two,
(12:56):
package three.
Yeah, because, you know,
they exceeded the 32k limit,
but they did a lot of
complex calculations inside the database,
and that really worked well.
And it used forms,
which was Form 6 at the time,
as a client. And it sounds kind of archaictoday,
but people were really happy with thesystem.
It performed well.
You had all the diagnostics and, you know,this is, in
(13:18):
my opinion, this was kind of, that waskind of nice because it
has implemented or the system implementeda lot of the things that I
learned at university, how to do databasedesign and development.
Yeah, we learned about process because youcouldn't just go and, you know,
hack into production and run updates tocorrect something.
Everything had to be, you know, system hadto be cloned.
You'd have to have the development teamwould create a test script.
(13:42):
You as the DBA, you would run the testscript.
Add to correct the issue that they had and
then somebody from the department from thecustomers they would check whether
the results are correct and only thenwould you go into production so
from many points of view that was valuablelessons learned.
Because it was all about process and thatwas money at stake kind of I
as soon as there is money at stake,
(14:03):
people pay a lot of attention to havethings done right.
But it's you know, that that was quite aformative period.
I learned a lot at that place, even thoughI was only how much time did I
spend here a year and a half or two beforeI moved to England.
But yeah, that was really a time where Ilearned a lot.
And I think that's one of those thingswhere I'm always consider
myself very fortunate. And I'm alwaysencouraging
(14:24):
people to have similar experiences where
Sometimes it just takes some little small
thing. It might be just a one-monthcontract,
a one-year contract,
something small part of your employmenthistory that can be
a real sort of a good learning experience.
For me, I worked for a big mining companyfor BHP
for about 13 years before I went to theUK.
And when you work in the same company for13 years,
you become known as an authority simplybecause of your duration,
(14:46):
but not necessarily because of your actualcorrectness of
knowledge. And I thought I kneweverything. And funny enough,
this is in the late 90s, Dave Ensor,
who was a legend in the Oracle circlesfrom many years ago,
recently passed away, unfortunately.
He came out and gave a talk in Perthsaying 20 mistakes
you're probably making with your Oracledatabase.
And I swan in thinking that,
well, obviously all these other jokers inthe, in the user group meeting,
(15:08):
they're going to be taken down a notch ortwo.
And I ticked off 19 of the 20.
I think I've got one thing.
Well, one thing correct.
The other 19 I was doing wrong.
And that was a good handling experience.And that's one of the reasons when I first
went to the UK, it was great just to seehow other people do things
in the Oracle world in terms of once youcan look at your LinkedIn stuff.
Almost all your jobs immediately startedpretty much with Oracle DBA.
(15:28):
So did you study Oracle at college?
Was that available as a unit or just likedatabases or just normal IT kind of stuff?
This is not going to be a rather lengthyexplanation.
I hope you don't mind. However,
at uni there was this lecture on databasedesign.
And in theory,
this lecture is kind of agnostic.
So we started system agnostic. So westarted off with drawing ER diagrams,
(15:51):
entity relationship diagrams, and we wouldstart modeling
systems, how would you do this properly soas to adhere to the
various rules of code and yournormalization,
all that kind of stuff.
And then it came to the implementationpart.
And at some point you've got to picksomething to implement on.
And I mucked around with MySQL beforethat.
And then we did Oracle,
this Oracle thing I've never come acrossbefore.
(16:13):
And I thought, how hard can it be? I cando inserts, updates,
deletes,
and I can truncate tables.
So I've got to be exactly the same thing.
And yeah,
it wasn't quite.
And even back in the day, I think it wasnine,
zero,
one when I learned Oracle.
But the person teaching that class,
he was really good and engaging.
(16:33):
And he took his students out to go and eatsushi after class.
So that was Thursdays.
And afterwards,
we went to the Irish pub once or twice,
maybe even more.
And that's how I kind of got hooked ontoOracle.
And there's like three other people,
I'm the third now,
from that university who has been taughtby the same person in Oracle.
One is Carsten,
(16:53):
who is in the Apex team and Klaus Thiel,who is in
a different team looking after autonomoushealth framework.
So we've all gone through this class moreor or less,
and we've all been inspired by this personto do Oracle.
Yeah, so that's another person I owe alot.
I kind of took over the machines,
well, administration of the machines inthe faculty pool.
(17:15):
So we had like 13, 14 machines at thetime,
and we'd install Oracle on those. And thatwas the
time before enterprise distributions havebeen out.
There was Red Hat,
and there was Zuse,
which was popular in Germany.
But installing Oracle involved hackingmake files and installing copilers and
doing all that stuff, which was kind of inthe early days of
(17:35):
Linux support for enterprise software.
And that's how I got into the DBA job. Iwanted to be a DBA because that was cool.
You know, you can do these things.
You can keep the systems up and running.
That kind of was a challenge I wanted todo.
And it's kind of,
I guess I'm very fortunate to be able tohave a
job that pays for what essentially is myhobby.
(17:56):
Exactly.
In fact, along a similar line,
it's funny how when I first joined
they approached me and they said, youknow, you're doing that stuff.
You're talking at conferences and you'redoing blogs
and the like. And I said, yeah. They said,
would you like to do that for us?
And I said,
yeah, yeah, that sounds good. And I said,
and what would the job be? And they went,well,
that would probably be most of the job.And I'm like,
so the stuff I do for fun in my sparetime,
(18:19):
you want me to do and you're going to payme for it. And they go, ah, yeah, okay.
Where do I sign for that?
But in terms of you say,
people having a significant impact on theway your career turns out,
mine's similar, but not at a collegelevel.
When I was working for BHP and we were allmainframe and
we were getting ready to move to thefuture,
which was client server,
client server was going to be the future.
(18:41):
We had all the vendors rolling up becauseBHP is one of
Australia's biggest companies. So theywere itching to get in
the door with all their new technologies.So we had
remember Gupta,
they used to think of SQL base,
we had IBM with their DB2 running on Unix,
we had SQL Server,
we had Oracle,
we had Ingress, Ingress Infomix,
all these vendors were coming in, pitchingtheir stuff.
After a long
(19:02):
it pretty much came down to Oracle andIngress.
This is back in the Oracle 6 timeframe.
And as developers,
we all thought Ingress was better,
especially the GUI tools for the actualfront end.
We were all settled on Ingress.
So we went around the room.
There's about 12 of us in the developmentteam and the project manager. And he goes,
OK, so what do you think?
And the first person says, yep,
Ingress. Next person says, Ingress.
I say Ingress.
(19:23):
We all go around. We all say Ingress.
And the project manager says, yep,
we're going Oracle.
And we're just, we're all shocked.
It turned out later on, many years later,we discovered that this project
manager had a not entirely professional
relationship with someone inside OracleCorporation.
And so there was, I'll leave it at that.
(19:43):
I won't go into the gory details, butpretty much that's
my understanding of why we ended upgrowing with Oracle.
But funnily enough, that turned out to beincredibly fortuitous because Ingress
long since fell by the wayside during thattimeframe,
and an Oracle still
Well, there we are. That's pretty cool.
That's funny. You mentioned forms in termsof teaching rigor and forms is
also one of those products that's whilestill in huge use.
(20:05):
Generally, people tend to treat it as verymuch a legacy product.
I always chuckle when people say thatbecause people
complain that things like forms on the webin particular,
it just doesn't make sense because you'redownloading these megabytes
sales jar files and everyone just saidthat is just
a ridiculous way through softwaredeployment.
And then you fast forward to today, andyou go to any website.
And the first thing that happens is youdownload 100 megabytes of JavaScript
(20:28):
And then everyone goes, oh, that's fine.That's
different. That's totally different.
I always think forms on the web, I
think was just maybe a little bit ahead ofits time,
perhaps a much maligned solution.
But anyway, I digress.
Continuing through my LinkedIn history,
we share a common patch of career history,which is
you set up Martin Buck consulting,
basically doing your own thing. And that'spretty much
why I did when I was working in the UK aswell.
(20:50):
How did you find that concept of basicallygoing out on your own and just fit to
be consulting for companies as opposed tobeing directly employed by them?
After I've spent a little bit of time atEDBA,
I think about two years,
maybe two and a half years,
I went to work in London and got to meetlots
of very smart people and knew all workedin investment
banking and they did such incrediblyinteresting stuff.
(21:12):
And, you know, getting their hands on thelatest technology,
real application clusters was a big thingthat I thought, hey,
this is something I would like to betterunderstand and work with.
But I didn't have the chance in myprevious
employments to work with these to thatextent I wanted to.
And, you know,
talking to all these incredibly talented,as it turns out,
contractors in London,
(21:32):
I just thought,
if they are doing that well, and if they
are successful, and they're having funwith what they do,
maybe I should try this contracting thingas well.
And, you know, quit the job,
set up a limited company, and then wentout hunting for contracts,
just like you did. But I guess at thetime,
when I did this,
the golden age of contracting in the cityof London has kind of
(21:55):
not come to a stop, but it was not growingat the same rapid rate as it was
And so what I did is I thought I'll grab acontract that keeps me busy for, you know,
two thirds of the week.
So I've got a little bit of time to dosmall consultancy gigs that
are short-term where I can do some work onthe trains maybe,
or, you know, be on site for a day.
(22:16):
that's essentially what I wanted to do.
And I was incredibly lucky and that it allworked out that way.
And I got to work with some really, reallycool projects,
very nice people on the way.
And I learned an awful lot. So that wasthat was fantastic.
I agree. It's funny,
having been a permanent or full timeemployee in Australia for so long.
(22:37):
And in those days, this is the late 90s inAustralia,
contractors were generally
seen as pariahs in companies.
They were seen as mercenaries that hadcome along.
There was generally a negative view towardcontract staff,
and maybe that still extends to this dayto some degree.
I was a little bit hesitant, but then whenI first went over there,
obviously the Y2K thing helped becausepeople
were just clamoring for contract staff.
(22:58):
But I still found that the concept ofgoing into,
for lack of a better
foreign environments and having to try hitthe ground running and not necessarily
going in as an expert, often just going inas another resource that was needed,
but just seeing the different way peopledo things.
I did one contract at Ford Motor Companywhere development
team lead was a big fan of Oracledesigner.
And so he'd put an edict in place.
(23:20):
that all the applications written for FordMotor Company
in by his team would be 100 % generatedout of designer.
And so if you couldn't generate it, thatpiece of
functionality or that the user wantedsomething in a certain
way, if it couldn't be generated, itwasn't done.
They came up with a workaround,
which was both limiting, but also amazingto see the fact that people could
build entire application portfolios 100 %generated,
(23:42):
the whole team had bought into it. Andthey were really as a contract group,
they were just a fantastic bunch of guysin the same way that
They were constantly trying to learn.
I remember one night they said,
look, would you mind staying behind a fewnights this week? We want to learn more
about this DBA stuff you do so we can bebetter at programming.
Once I picked myself off off the floor tohave to have a group
developers, you know, make the request.Yeah, we did some some
(24:04):
late evening stuff about backup recovery,
roll IDs and stuff like that.
You just encounter these people when youswitch companies regularly.
I found,
yeah, you encounter these interestingprojects,
interesting people.
Having said that, given that we're bothOracle employees,
I want to stress to anyone listening,
we're not encouraging people to go out andrace around the
different companies. If you're working forOracle,
you want to stay at Oracle.
(24:25):
That's very important.
In our next episode,
Martin and I will chat about another thingwe have in common,
namely being active on social mediathrough
the medium of blog posting and othermechanisms.
Both of us have blogs going back severaldecades.
We'll share how we got them started,
the motivations for them and what thefuture may hold.
(24:47):
Catch you then.
Thanks for listening to this podcast,
the music credit goes to Zanman fromPixabay Music.
G'day, everyone.
My name's Connor McDonald.
Welcome to The Spoken Nerd,
the podcast about database technology.
In today's episode, or this will probablydraw into several episodes,
I'm delighted to have a chat to a goodfriend of mine named Martin Bach.
Martin lives in the UK.
Sorry, he lives in Europe.
I shouldn't say the UK.
I'm getting ahead of myself.
We're going to talk about the UK in asecond.
(00:23):
Martin lives in Europe.
We've met each other many times atconferences over the past,
but this is the first time we've done apodcast together. Welcome,
Martin. Hey,
Conor. Thank you very much for having me.
Now I have to ask,
this won't be useful for people on thepodcast,
but what is your virtual background?
Is that Doctor Who or Star Wars or StarTrek?
Well,
a long time ago, like when I was 15 or so,
(00:46):
I started enjoying watching Star Trek andI started out with Next Generation
and the follow up to that eventuallybecame Voyager.
And the bridge you can see is CaptainJaneway's bridge and
Voyager is great because it's drawn outover seven seasons,
lots of episodes and it's good fun to
watch. And I quite like The Voyager.
It's funny,
I grew up, I shouldn't show my age, I grewup with the original
(01:07):
Star Trek as a very young child.
And it's really embarrassing because I wasso young.
We'd watch it with my parents on a Sundaynight.
And every time some sort of alien camealong, I was literally terrified.
You know, most nights I'd be ending up inthe parents'
bedroom saying, you know, I'm havingnightmares, etc.
And then you fast forward 40 years and youfind these old episodes on YouTube.
And it's these people with paper machemasks,
(01:30):
and they've been spray painted green.
And it's just like,
it literally is like watching a comedyshow. And I'm sitting there as a child,
because we'd only recently got colour TV,
the ability for a child to just immersethemselves in this world of
make believe. And it's just somewhatembarrassing now, because my mother still
even to this day enjoys pointing out theseold Star Trek things going,
and you used to be scared of that.
(01:51):
Anyway, I shouldn't digress into Star Trekbecause the Star Wars
fans will be up against me or the StarTrek fans will be up against me once
we start talking about who is the betterCaptain Kirk and the like.
Now correct me if I'm wrong,
are you of German descent?
I am indeed and I do live in Germany.
But as you said,
I've lived in the UK for a fair bit.
We first met in the UK and I use met ininverted commas
(02:11):
because our paths crossed via a companywhich we'll talk about shortly.
But before we get into that,
what took you to the UK when you first gotwhen you first moved there? In fact, when
did you move to the UK? That must havebeen 2006,
but that wasn't the first time I've been.
So I went to a university which requiredpeople to do an internship.
And as an alternative,
(02:32):
you could do a semester at one of thepartner uni's.
And because I wanted to improve mylanguage skills at the time,
I was in year four or so at uni,
we could go to Staffordshire University,
which is kind of between Birmingham andManchester.
and i did one semester there because ididn't do an international degree like
some of my friends who accompanied me buti was there for half a year and
(02:55):
i really really liked it i mean i'm sayingthat because we
were at stoke campus which was the lastporsche
and Stoke and Trent at the time saw somestruggling with
the decline of the major industry overthere.
It was my best semester,
I have to say, hands down,
because it was so much fun.
Because there were students fromeverywhere, Italy,
(03:17):
France, Spain,
and the international students always hungout.
And I thought this was a great experience.
I'd like to repeat that at some point.
So I started working after coming back, Istarted to work locally.
And then I thought,
you know, I'm now 20 odd years old. And ifI don't do a few years abroad,
I probably settle down and won't do it.That was the best thing that I met
the owner of the company we'll talk aboutshortly and we had phone interviews and
(03:41):
had never been to the place and I've nevermet the guy and I just signed more
or less on the spot and then I went thereafter they were moving offices.
They just moved offices. I met them on aweekend and we had
a lovely night out on Saturday in Brightonand it was just
marvelous and I said yeah it was a bit ofa risk but it paid out in the
Oh that's fantastic.
(04:02):
It's funny actually like I'm from on apersonal note I'm really thrilled to hear
you say that because my son Max is in hissecond year of
university and he's just transitioned fromhis existing course he's starting to
be a lawyer let's not put that against himbut he's starting to be a lawyer but he's
just transitioned into a different part ofthe degree course now which gives him an
honours degree but part of that is you doa six month overseas assignment
(04:23):
at another university and the universitysets it up for him so he gets
pretty much to choose where he wants togo.
But it's always heartening to hear otherpeople who have done these things
where they've gone abroad on a whim or anexperiment.
I've almost never heard anyone come backgoing,
yeah, that was a mistake.
Most people, it's just a great way ofbroadening your mind.
Well, I have to admit,
when I went to the UK,
it was in 1999.
And I would love to say it was part of myuniversity course, but no,
(04:46):
I'd been out of the workforce for maybe abit longer than that.
But it's funny, I went to the UK,
I hate to admit,
for solely financial reasons in the sensethat it was just before Y2K.
And of course, we were told that there wasjust contract
work coming out of the rafters every UK.
And that was
We could literally,
my wife and I at the time,
we could literally pick a place we wantedto live.
(05:06):
It's like, oh, let's go see this place.And then we find a
job and then you can find somewhere elseto live and find a job.
It was just fantastic.
And I'll happily concede.
I went there thinking, this is going to bea great way to make money.
I didn't really care about broadening mymind or seeing the world.
And my wife said, no,
we're traveling because we want to see theworld and prove ourselves.
And she was right.
I was very much like,
let's just get one contract, stay there,not move around.
(05:28):
And she was like, no, let's exploreEurope.
And we had contracts,
even in English speaking parts of France,we had a contract there, mainly in the UK,
one in Italy. And it was just probably thebest decision I've ever made.
And one of those jobs was, in fact,
one of the first jobs I had was at a placecalled Royal Sun Alliance,
which is in Horsham near Gatwick Airport.
And the reason I got that job is the DBAthat was there was a woman named Lisa.
(05:49):
You and I both know it. And she wasleaving the job.
She said, I'm leaving a job to form acompany.
I'm going to form a company.
It's going to be a remote databaseconsultancy company,
which of course nowadays is the norm,
because it was a big thing in those daysbecause the
internet was still fledging. In fact,
most of our stuff was dial-up.
How did you get involved with eDBA?
Was it just literally that random phonecall or what made you find them?
(06:11):
I don't remember which job site it wasexactly,
but I just browsed for available DBAroles,
which was what I was interested in at thetime.
And one of them was for EDBA.
And they said, yeah,
we do this and that. And it's all remote,
not quite as much travel,
which is nice.
So you've got more time to yourself ortravel when you want to travel.
(06:31):
And they also had the name of, you know,
this famous Connor McDonald on theirwebsite who works with them.
I thought, you know,
I don't think I had any fame then or nowfor that matter.
Well,
it certainly rang a big bell for me.
If Conor is working there, it can't bethat bad.
So that's how we got into phoneinterviews.
I think we did two or three phoneinterviews and they
(06:53):
offered me the job and that was inBrighton.
And like I said,
I've signed,
I've not seen Brighton.
But the other jobs that were on offer,
they were kind of further up north,
which is something I have a problem withbecause I've been at the union.
I quite like the accent from kind of theMidlands and further up.
And well,
(07:14):
it was just pure coincidence.
They were the fastest to have an offer outand that's how I signed.
And then, of course,
they said, you know, ah,
this thing on the website with Connor,
he's already moved on.
But that was no problem.
The guys were, I mean,
I've never felt so welcome.
And yeah,
well, we talk about that later. So I don'twant to jump ahead.
I have to admit, it's
(07:35):
It's funny you should say that, as I said,
I was joining Royal Sun Alliance to workas a DBA and Lisa was moving on.
But very quickly,
even though I was still working with RSA,
I found myself doing a little bit of adhoc work for EDBA
simply because they were just really nicepeople.
In those days,
they literally were working out of thebedroom.
They had a few staff members.
Each one had a bedroom each in which theyhad converted to a study.
(07:57):
And as I said,
most of the remote monitoring we did,
well, the only network access companies
would allow in those days was outgoingemail.
So we'd literally,
my job at EDBA was to write a bundle loadof shell scripts.
I'd be embarrassed to look at themnowadays,
but a bundle of shell scripts that we ranon each customer service,
it would bundle up all this usefulinformation and literally send emails to
(08:17):
us. And we had a little process internallythat would simply pick
those emails off and try convert it intoimportant things.
Still, I really enjoyed that concept ofseeing
someone in that sort of entrepreneur mode.
A lot of us in IT think, oh yes,
you know, if we could form a startup,
we'd go great guns. But I think it takes afair bit of courage. And
I was always impressed with Lisa inparticular who just said,
yeah, we're starting with nothing.
(08:38):
We've got a modem to the house inBrighton.
And so that'll be enough to get up andrunning.
So did you, when you moved to the UK,
did you move to Brighton itself? Did youlive in Brighton?
Just off Brighton,
I mean it's still Brighton,
but Preston Park.
That was also after I think I moved threeor four times.
It was a little bit hard to get to get aplace in the first place because
(08:59):
at the time you needed a bank account tobe able to rent something.
But in order to get a bank account,
you needed to have a residential address.
I remember that catch-22.
Yeah, that was a little tricky. Until Ifound a place where they said, yeah,
we'll give you a bank account based onyour passport.
And that was it.
And then everything sprung into place.
But, you know, Brighton is pretty busy,lots of students.
(09:21):
So finding a place to rent was a bittougher than I expected.
And I ended up moving a few times,
but I moved out to Preston Park,
which is the last stop before Brighton, ifyou go on the main line.
And that is exactly the place to be, in myopinion,
because Brighton station and everythingaround Brighton
station towards the seafront getsincredibly busy,
especially over summer months.
(09:42):
And it's, you know, lots of partygoers andit doesn't always look
quite so neat and tidy on a Monday whenyou walk into the office.
So Preston Park was the place to be.
It used to be that place from Brightonwhere you'd be walking near the train
station at night and you'd see half akebab.
And you'd wonder if that was the eatenkebab or the uneaten part.
But either way, we generally not the mostpalatable things.
(10:03):
Not that I want to turn this tech talkinto a
tourism thing. But when it comes toBrighton,
you and I both do share a place that weabsolutely love.
There's a tapas place in Brighton and isit shipping lanes?
Is that the name of the Soviet?
It's the it's the lanes,
as opposed to the north lanes,
not to be confused.
But it's in the lanes. Yes.
So yeah, so anyone listen to this podcast,if you're ever in Brighton,
(10:23):
Is it Carzadel?
Carzadon Carlos.
Carzadon Carlos.
You heard it here first.
Simply the best tapas place.
10 years ago when my partner and I startedthe English channel,
the first thing we did when we got back toEngland was
we went to the tapas place and had tapasthere.
It was absolutely fantastic.
Do you keep in touch with any of the EDBApeople?
I kind of lost contact with most of
(10:45):
them. So I'm still connected with themover LinkedIn.
But you know,
a lot of them have
Edba then eventually got acquired, I thinka couple of times or so,
and most of the people I used to work withat the time,
they have done other things,
but they were absolutely the best crowd tocrash into,
so to say.
And they were so welcoming and
(11:07):
totally different culture to what I wasused to before.
So I used to work after university.
I went to work in Luxembourg,
which is well known for its financialindustry and people there were huge.
And, you know,
that goes back 20 years now.
Everyone wears a suit,
everyone wears a tie,
proper shoes to match the outfit and itwas all very formal.
(11:29):
And at the end of the day,
everyone would just go home.
Whereas at EDBA,
over a short amount of time,
I became friends with most of them, Iguess, and then with everyone.
on a Friday,
we would go out to the pub and have a beeror two to celebrate the end of the week.
And that was just such a great experience.
And I wouldn't want to miss that.
You mentioned Luxembourg. I have to admit,
(11:50):
obviously, before we got in the podcast,
I did my usual LinkedIn stalking.
I won't talk about your time inLuxembourg, but I did see one of the
companies you worked for said IG EFI.
What does that stand for?
I'm just curious.
It's French.
So what it means is they build softwarefor fund accounting.
(12:13):
So essentially, if you're a big bank andyou're maintaining funds,
over the course of the day,
you would get all the trades that havebeen made that would get into the system
and you click a button at four o'clock inthe afternoon and
it calculates the net value of yourassets.
And that gets then sent to the variousstock exchanges where these are listed.
That was really a really, really goodexperience because
(12:36):
that's one of the few places I have seenwhere they did development
right for what was right at the time.
They used all the business logicprocessing inside the database,
which I thought was awesome.
So they had packages and I don't know howmany,
they even exceeded the size of a package.
So it was eventually became package andthen package two,
(12:56):
package three.
Yeah, because, you know,
they exceeded the 32k limit,
but they did a lot of
complex calculations inside the database,
and that really worked well.
And it used forms,
which was Form 6 at the time,
as a client. And it sounds kind of archaictoday,
but people were really happy with thesystem.
It performed well.
You had all the diagnostics and, you know,this is, in
(13:18):
my opinion, this was kind of, that waskind of nice because it
has implemented or the system implementeda lot of the things that I
learned at university, how to do databasedesign and development.
Yeah, we learned about process because youcouldn't just go and, you know,
hack into production and run updates tocorrect something.
Everything had to be, you know, system hadto be cloned.
You'd have to have the development teamwould create a test script.
(13:42):
You as the DBA, you would run the testscript.
Add to correct the issue that they had and
then somebody from the department from thecustomers they would check whether
the results are correct and only thenwould you go into production so
from many points of view that was valuablelessons learned.
Because it was all about process and thatwas money at stake kind of I
as soon as there is money at stake,
(14:03):
people pay a lot of attention to havethings done right.
But it's you know, that that was quite aformative period.
I learned a lot at that place, even thoughI was only how much time did I
spend here a year and a half or two beforeI moved to England.
But yeah, that was really a time where Ilearned a lot.
And I think that's one of those thingswhere I'm always consider
myself very fortunate. And I'm alwaysencouraging
(14:24):
people to have similar experiences where
Sometimes it just takes some little small
thing. It might be just a one-monthcontract,
a one-year contract,
something small part of your employmenthistory that can be
a real sort of a good learning experience.
For me, I worked for a big mining companyfor BHP
for about 13 years before I went to theUK.
And when you work in the same company for13 years,
you become known as an authority simplybecause of your duration,
(14:46):
but not necessarily because of your actualcorrectness of
knowledge. And I thought I kneweverything. And funny enough,
this is in the late 90s, Dave Ensor,
who was a legend in the Oracle circlesfrom many years ago,
recently passed away, unfortunately.
He came out and gave a talk in Perthsaying 20 mistakes
you're probably making with your Oracledatabase.
And I swan in thinking that,
well, obviously all these other jokers inthe, in the user group meeting,
(15:08):
they're going to be taken down a notch ortwo.
And I ticked off 19 of the 20.
I think I've got one thing.
Well, one thing correct.
The other 19 I was doing wrong.
And that was a good handling experience.And that's one of the reasons when I first
went to the UK, it was great just to seehow other people do things
in the Oracle world in terms of once youcan look at your LinkedIn stuff.
Almost all your jobs immediately startedpretty much with Oracle DBA.
(15:28):
So did you study Oracle at college?
Was that available as a unit or just likedatabases or just normal IT kind of stuff?
This is not going to be a rather lengthyexplanation.
I hope you don't mind. However,
at uni there was this lecture on databasedesign.
And in theory,
this lecture is kind of agnostic.
So we started system agnostic. So westarted off with drawing ER diagrams,
(15:51):
entity relationship diagrams, and we wouldstart modeling
systems, how would you do this properly soas to adhere to the
various rules of code and yournormalization,
all that kind of stuff.
And then it came to the implementationpart.
And at some point you've got to picksomething to implement on.
And I mucked around with MySQL beforethat.
And then we did Oracle,
this Oracle thing I've never come acrossbefore.
(16:13):
And I thought, how hard can it be? I cando inserts, updates,
deletes,
and I can truncate tables.
So I've got to be exactly the same thing.
And yeah,
it wasn't quite.
And even back in the day, I think it wasnine,
zero,
one when I learned Oracle.
But the person teaching that class,
he was really good and engaging.
(16:33):
And he took his students out to go and eatsushi after class.
So that was Thursdays.
And afterwards,
we went to the Irish pub once or twice,
maybe even more.
And that's how I kind of got hooked ontoOracle.
And there's like three other people,
I'm the third now,
from that university who has been taughtby the same person in Oracle.
One is Carsten,
(16:53):
who is in the Apex team and Klaus Thiel,who is in
a different team looking after autonomoushealth framework.
So we've all gone through this class moreor or less,
and we've all been inspired by this personto do Oracle.
Yeah, so that's another person I owe alot.
I kind of took over the machines,
well, administration of the machines inthe faculty pool.
(17:15):
So we had like 13, 14 machines at thetime,
and we'd install Oracle on those. And thatwas the
time before enterprise distributions havebeen out.
There was Red Hat,
and there was Zuse,
which was popular in Germany.
But installing Oracle involved hackingmake files and installing copilers and
doing all that stuff, which was kind of inthe early days of
(17:35):
Linux support for enterprise software.
And that's how I got into the DBA job. Iwanted to be a DBA because that was cool.
You know, you can do these things.
You can keep the systems up and running.
That kind of was a challenge I wanted todo.
And it's kind of,
I guess I'm very fortunate to be able tohave a
job that pays for what essentially is myhobby.
(17:56):
Exactly.
In fact, along a similar line,
it's funny how when I first joined
they approached me and they said, youknow, you're doing that stuff.
You're talking at conferences and you'redoing blogs
and the like. And I said, yeah. They said,
would you like to do that for us?
And I said,
yeah, yeah, that sounds good. And I said,
and what would the job be? And they went,well,
that would probably be most of the job.And I'm like,
so the stuff I do for fun in my sparetime,
(18:19):
you want me to do and you're going to payme for it. And they go, ah, yeah, okay.
Where do I sign for that?
But in terms of you say,
people having a significant impact on theway your career turns out,
mine's similar, but not at a collegelevel.
When I was working for BHP and we were allmainframe and
we were getting ready to move to thefuture,
which was client server,
client server was going to be the future.
(18:41):
We had all the vendors rolling up becauseBHP is one of
Australia's biggest companies. So theywere itching to get in
the door with all their new technologies.So we had
remember Gupta,
they used to think of SQL base,
we had IBM with their DB2 running on Unix,
we had SQL Server,
we had Oracle,
we had Ingress, Ingress Infomix,
all these vendors were coming in, pitchingtheir stuff.
After a long
(19:02):
it pretty much came down to Oracle andIngress.
This is back in the Oracle 6 timeframe.
And as developers,
we all thought Ingress was better,
especially the GUI tools for the actualfront end.
We were all settled on Ingress.
So we went around the room.
There's about 12 of us in the developmentteam and the project manager. And he goes,
OK, so what do you think?
And the first person says, yep,
Ingress. Next person says, Ingress.
I say Ingress.
(19:23):
We all go around. We all say Ingress.
And the project manager says, yep,
we're going Oracle.
And we're just, we're all shocked.
It turned out later on, many years later,we discovered that this project
manager had a not entirely professional
relationship with someone inside OracleCorporation.
And so there was, I'll leave it at that.
(19:43):
I won't go into the gory details, butpretty much that's
my understanding of why we ended upgrowing with Oracle.
But funnily enough, that turned out to beincredibly fortuitous because Ingress
long since fell by the wayside during thattimeframe,
and an Oracle still
Well, there we are. That's pretty cool.
That's funny. You mentioned forms in termsof teaching rigor and forms is
also one of those products that's whilestill in huge use.
(20:05):
Generally, people tend to treat it as verymuch a legacy product.
I always chuckle when people say thatbecause people
complain that things like forms on the webin particular,
it just doesn't make sense because you'redownloading these megabytes
sales jar files and everyone just saidthat is just
a ridiculous way through softwaredeployment.
And then you fast forward to today, andyou go to any website.
And the first thing that happens is youdownload 100 megabytes of JavaScript
(20:28):
And then everyone goes, oh, that's fine.That's
different. That's totally different.
I always think forms on the web, I
think was just maybe a little bit ahead ofits time,
perhaps a much maligned solution.
But anyway, I digress.
Continuing through my LinkedIn history,
we share a common patch of career history,which is
you set up Martin Buck consulting,
basically doing your own thing. And that'spretty much
why I did when I was working in the UK aswell.
(20:50):
How did you find that concept of basicallygoing out on your own and just fit to
be consulting for companies as opposed tobeing directly employed by them?
After I've spent a little bit of time atEDBA,
I think about two years,
maybe two and a half years,
I went to work in London and got to meetlots
of very smart people and knew all workedin investment
banking and they did such incrediblyinteresting stuff.
(21:12):
And, you know, getting their hands on thelatest technology,
real application clusters was a big thingthat I thought, hey,
this is something I would like to betterunderstand and work with.
But I didn't have the chance in myprevious
employments to work with these to thatextent I wanted to.
And, you know,
talking to all these incredibly talented,as it turns out,
contractors in London,
(21:32):
I just thought,
if they are doing that well, and if they
are successful, and they're having funwith what they do,
maybe I should try this contracting thingas well.
And, you know, quit the job,
set up a limited company, and then wentout hunting for contracts,
just like you did. But I guess at thetime,
when I did this,
the golden age of contracting in the cityof London has kind of
(21:55):
not come to a stop, but it was not growingat the same rapid rate as it was
And so what I did is I thought I'll grab acontract that keeps me busy for, you know,
two thirds of the week.
So I've got a little bit of time to dosmall consultancy gigs that
are short-term where I can do some work onthe trains maybe,
or, you know, be on site for a day.
(22:16):
that's essentially what I wanted to do.
And I was incredibly lucky and that it allworked out that way.
And I got to work with some really, reallycool projects,
very nice people on the way.
And I learned an awful lot. So that wasthat was fantastic.
I agree. It's funny,
having been a permanent or full timeemployee in Australia for so long.
(22:37):
And in those days, this is the late 90s inAustralia,
contractors were generally
seen as pariahs in companies.
They were seen as mercenaries that hadcome along.
There was generally a negative view towardcontract staff,
and maybe that still extends to this dayto some degree.
I was a little bit hesitant, but then whenI first went over there,
obviously the Y2K thing helped becausepeople
were just clamoring for contract staff.
(22:58):
But I still found that the concept ofgoing into,
for lack of a better
foreign environments and having to try hitthe ground running and not necessarily
going in as an expert, often just going inas another resource that was needed,
but just seeing the different way peopledo things.
I did one contract at Ford Motor Companywhere development
team lead was a big fan of Oracledesigner.
And so he'd put an edict in place.
(23:20):
that all the applications written for FordMotor Company
in by his team would be 100 % generatedout of designer.
And so if you couldn't generate it, thatpiece of
functionality or that the user wantedsomething in a certain
way, if it couldn't be generated, itwasn't done.
They came up with a workaround,
which was both limiting, but also amazingto see the fact that people could
build entire application portfolios 100 %generated,
(23:42):
the whole team had bought into it. Andthey were really as a contract group,
they were just a fantastic bunch of guysin the same way that
They were constantly trying to learn.
I remember one night they said,
look, would you mind staying behind a fewnights this week? We want to learn more
about this DBA stuff you do so we can bebetter at programming.
Once I picked myself off off the floor tohave to have a group
developers, you know, make the request.Yeah, we did some some
(24:04):
late evening stuff about backup recovery,
roll IDs and stuff like that.
You just encounter these people when youswitch companies regularly.
I found,
yeah, you encounter these interestingprojects,
interesting people.
Having said that, given that we're bothOracle employees,
I want to stress to anyone listening,
we're not encouraging people to go out andrace around the
different companies. If you're working forOracle,
you want to stay at Oracle.
(24:25):
That's very important.
In our next episode,
Martin and I will chat about another thingwe have in common,
namely being active on social mediathrough
the medium of blog posting and othermechanisms.
Both of us have blogs going back severaldecades.
We'll share how we got them started,
the motivations for them and what thefuture may hold.
(24:47):
Catch you then.
Thanks for listening to this podcast,
the music credit goes to Zanman fromPixabay Music.
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