Contract Developer
P&O Nedlloyd (Sydney, Australia)
February 2003-June 2003
P&O Nedlloyd is a globally renowned shipping firm. The software development department for applications used by the P&O Asia-Pacific offices is located in Sydney, Australia. I worked as a contract UNIX and Oracle development engineer in the Asia-Pacific Regional Development team. All software was developed for the IBM AIX (UNIX) platform, using Oracle Forms and Reports 6i, Oracle PL/SQL and Oracle Pro*C (Oracle SQL and PL/SQL embedded in C programs) deployed on Oracle 8i databases. Batch jobs were managed using the ksh scripting language.
Initially I was taken on to develop applications and fix bugs using these technologies. Towards the end of the contract, I was worked as part of a team specifically responsible for fixing the worst performing batch jobs and reports.
Key Responsibilities:
- Develop Oracle Forms, Reports and PL/SQL applications
- Develop UNIX scripts (ksh)
- Investigate and fix problems relating to the Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, PL/SQL and UNIX scripting issues.
- Investigate, propose solutions for and solve software performance issues.
Key Achievements:
- Developed system for P&O Thailand office.
- Assisted in development of ad-hoc applications for Thailand, South Korea and Hong Kong offices.
- Investigated and solved numerous PL/SQL and batch performance problems.
- Assisted in the development and testing of a tool to better investigate performance problems in the Oracle PL/SQL procedures and queries.
Skills:
Operating Systems
- IBM AIX 4.x; Windows 95.
Development Tools
- T.O.A.D., GNU emacs for PL/SQL development; Oracle Developer (Forms and Reports) Release 6i; Oracle Server 8.1.x.
Development Languages
- SQL*Plus; PL/SQL; scripting (ksh); Pro*C; C.
Source Control
- rcs based, in-house source control.
Other Technologies
- Performance Tuning; EDI; MySQL database; XML; GnuPG
Projects:
Thailand Customs Manifest Automation: This was to develop an application for use by the Thailand office in Bangkok. The Thai customs office required ship manifest information in electronic format from the 1st of April, 2003. As the Thai office was using the legacy tracking system, called �non core�, it was necessary to develop the application for that system first. This was a system that used SQL*Forms 3.0, ksh on AIX and an Oracle8 database. Once the information using the form was input, there was an extraction job to convert it to the format required by the Thai customs using a system to query the database and translate it to the EDI format.
As this was an old system and there were no longer any developers with experience with it, I was tasked with investigating the system in order to determine how to extend the SQL*Forms application and with developing the ksh scripts to launch and queue the jobs.
Performance Tuning: One of my duties in the Asia Pacific Regional Development team was to resolve bugs and other problems. Many of these were performance issues with stored procedures and functions in the PL/SQL code, with Oracle Reports reports and Pro*C programs. Eventually, as the means to identify the offending programs improved in the DBA team, a team was formed to tackle the issues as they arose. My job was to bring my experience with previous problems to the team and to investigate the more intransigent problems.