Over the past year, I’ve been working in DevRel focused on modern application development with Oracle AI Database.
Coming from a product engineering background, the shift was challenging: I moved from product, DevOps, and infrastructure work into a public-facing role, meeting users, partnering with PMs, and building a presence in the Oracle developer community.
It’s been a steep learning curve. I’ve picked up new skills and keep looking for ways to improve; whether that’s creating high-quality, developer-focused content, improving my public speaking, or navigating complex corporate relationships.
What is DevRel like at Oracle?
DevRel means wearing many hats. In a given week I might draft a blog post, build a POC, talk with users, partner with PMs, publish open-source contributions, and plan a database session.
There’s always a new challenge, a new concept to learn, and a new opportunity to pursue. This keeps the day-to-day engaging, and I’ve especially enjoyed the public-facing and open-source work: hearing from developers who use what we build is incredibly rewarding.
Some cool things I’ve worked on in the last year
- Wrote 68 articles covering a range of technical topics.
- Attended conferences like Oracle AI World and KubeCon.
- Created labs, code samples, videos, and sessions for database content.
- Spoke at internal and external events on applied database features.
Goals for the year ahead
I’ve had success reaching Oracle developers, and this year I want to engage the broader community. Many outside the Oracle ecosystem still have limited or outdated perceptions of Oracle AI Database; my goal is to meet them where they are and show its value through compelling hands-on demos and open examples.
Building and developing new relationships continues to be a goal. I’d like to branch out more in the developer community, meet and talk to more users, and grow community engagement.
I’d also like to focus more on video content. While I’ve created some videos, it’s not a skill I have, and I’d like to tighten up my video editing chops to create compelling content.
Key features developers should know about
In conversations with existing users, developers, and prospective customers, I find many still see Oracle as “just a RDBMS”.
Oracle AI Database has evolved over the years, and it’s converged, multi-model database supports documents, events, vectors, spatial, graph, in-memory acceleration, and more all in one engine, with governance, scalability, and transactions built in.
Top three key features I’d like to see developers use more of:
- JSON + JSON Relational Duality Views: JSON + relational data? Awesome.
- Event Streaming with TxEventQ: High-throughput messaging built into the database.
- Vectors and DBMS AI integrations: MCP, vector search, NL2SQL and more.
Of course, there’s a lot more. These just happen to be my favorites, and on the ones I work with the most. The whole “multi-model database” paradigm deserves it’s own article, so stay tuned for the year ahead!
Links
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