Andrew Mendelsohn

FOR: Oracle Database 10g

When Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president of server technologies at Oracle, looks back on his days as a computer science student at Princeton University, he remembers an important first impression. Despite the “horrible” user interface of the IBM mainframe computer on which Mendelsohn learned Fortran programming, the computer itself masked the enormous complexity of the computing processes taking place within it.

Mendelsohn applied that first impression to his work in developing the Oracle Database 10g--a software suite that enables enterprises needing extreme computing power to grow and manage colossal computing frameworks, or grids, from inexpensive storage and server components.

“The word grid comes from the electrical grid and the appliance computing model--a simple interface where you don’t have to worry about the complexity in the background,” he said.

The confidence Mendelsohn had in his 10g development team led the engineering group to actually create its own computing grid to run the analysis for the project itself. “Interestingly enough, we talked about how grid computing was the wave of the future, so during the development of 10g, we internally moved our development organization onto a grid for the development,” he said.

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Now, Oracle’s 10g technology can be found running hefty programs for the likes of Qualcomm, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the New Mexico Department of Transportation. “Beyond that, soon we’ll enable grids to perform like a complete utility,” Mendelsohn said.

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Education:

B.S.E. in electrical engineering and computer science, Princeton University; graduate work in computer science, MIT

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Yahoo or google:

Google

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Favorite handheld:

Palm Pilot

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First paying job

Camp counselor

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