I have been working in the IT industry for the past 12 years, working exclusively with databases for the past 10 years.  

As a senior developer and then architect and R&D DBA, I have been working with Oracle for the past 8+ years . In fact, I got my Oracle DBA certification 6 years ago, in 2000 and have been looking at, as time allows, upgrading my certification to 10g.

My progression and specialty has been such that around 2000 I started working with hundreds of thousands of records, in 2002 with tens and hundred of millions, and in 2003 worked with and architected a system of billions of records. 

My most challenging project was a contract for a MapPoint enablement for Microsoft, where we loaded and processed billions of records from various third party providers and processed this data using statistics and complex formulas, parsing those records a great deal of times, over and over, in a batch fashion.  After project specs were finalized, I was in charge single-handedly of the entire lifecycle, including schema design (logical and physical), coding through packages for high performance calculations of trillions of operations. 

The project included loading (SQLLOADER and some other data pump programs, one of which I created myself), partitioning, IOT, some analytics, complex views, some materialized views  in which I had to optimize the server for batch operations.  In fact, it was this project to which I owe the depth of my knowledge and deep appreciation for what Oracle and the Oracle RDBMS truly is. 

Any mature piece of software such as Oracle, unfortunately, without the proper understanding, knowledge and experience, can be used and abused and brought to a crawl.  It is when developers and architects treat a project, a piece of software, a module in a "white-box" fashion, always asking "why" and going to the most granular detail of information, it is only then, when "miracles" occur and the magic of skill and

Last but not least, I owe a great debt of gratitude to the many unsung heroes who have helped further my career, including my former boss at Symmetrical, Alva Bell Bullard along with the many wizards of Oracle such as Tom Kyte, Jonathan Lewis, Mark Rittman, Steven Feuerstein, Carry Millsap, and the many other unsung heroes, including my former and current co-workers and employers, without whom my efforts and often, sacrifices, would not have been possible.