Oracle

After a gruelling on-campus Summer Internship season, I finally made it to Oracle. I worked in the NoSQL Database team, which is responsible for Oracle's distributed NoSQL database service that offers low latency and high throughput for mission-critical applications.

Numerous customers of Oracle used the migration tool of the NoSQL team to migrate their databases which were either a file/object store to Oracle's OnPrem DB or the Oracle Cloud DB. However, the migration tool had a major issue of causing significant downtime for customers during the migration process which was a huge pain point for them.

Servers could crash, processes could get terminated, outages could happen, in any case, the migration process that could sometimes comprise over 4TB worth of data would have to start all over again, from the top. This wasted time, effort and resources for our customers.

Our task was to make a sound checkpoint feature for the migration tool that would ensure data was backed up, the last safest state was tracked, and the process could resume from the point of failure, saving clients numerous hours and bringing downtime to a near zero.

On a more personal note, this was my first proper professional experience and I'm glad, even though our internship was about 3 months long, the team encouraged us to work on production-grade projects that were actually relevant to the organisation. I had barely used git before this, and almost never paid much attention to neatly written code before. I thought OOP was a subject and nothing more and as funny as it may sound now, I learnt how to REALLY write code at Oracle.

Turns out my degree was a little useful afterall.

And yes, they were kind enough to call me back for a full-time role and I will be returning to Oracle later this year.