About me

Toine

I am Toine van Beckhoven, an Oracle developer and DBA or as I mostly call myself: an Oracle specialist. That sounds rather all-round and indeed that is what I try to be. But at the same time a specialist. And that is hard, because there is so much to learn, to know and to experience. But I learn easily and have some analytic skills. And too many things about Oracle are too interesting to leave them aside. I have been working as a developer mainly, doing SQL, PL/SQL, Forms/Reports and JHeadstart. But always DBA related work has been a part of my job. I am especially interested in performance tuning, since this covers a lot of things in Oracle and is probably the closest to development. I always say: being a DBA makes me a better developer and the other way around. I read material and attend presentations as much as I can from the experts in this world: Tom Kyte, Cary Millsap/Jeff Holt, Jonathan Lewis, Anjo Kolk, Wolfgang Breitling and many others.

I like to share my experience and knowledge of Oracle with others, in the form of articles, discussions, presentations and now this blog. Due to a busy schedule, I will probably not post nearly as much as I intend to…but I will try.

In my personal life I am a fanatic athlete. I have been “on track” since 1985 and there it is not any different from my professional life: I like to be an all-round athlete as well. To the most extreme, I take part in double decathlons (also called the icosathlon). This year I finished my 7th one. And it was a special one: the World Championships (http://www.20kamp.nl). And for that little piece of specialty, I would say it was the 400 metres hurdles (53.31 in 2003).