Inspired by Patricia Selinger

Patricia Selinger I got to read about an interview with an IBM fellow, who is privileged to work in Data management from the "Relational era" to the "XML era". Her name is Patricia Selinger presently the "VP Area Strategy, Information and Interaction".

We have lot of things to learn from her career and experience, from the decision to take "Technical" or "Management" career path to balancing work/life while working with people in different geographies.
I will give you a concise view about her interview. But I request you to read/hear this interview from
"http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/witexhibit/wit_fellows_selinger.html".

She took management path after 3 years of work and rose to fourth line in management. After which she routed back to technology for which received the title of IBM Fellow, an honor accorded only to the top 50 technical experts in IBM, for her exceptional technical work and leadership in relational databases.

Because of market requirement and to bridge gap between Research and Development, for a period of 3 to 5 years she and her team was doing FVT(Functional verification Test), unit test , specs all for DB2.

She was part of, what she calls it as 3 generations of Databases. One being the relational one on Mainframes, the second being the DB2 for LUW ( which had starbust compiler ) and the 3rd being the Unstructured data (XML) database management system, The Viper.

Her technical contribution was enormous, most of them relating to cost based optimizer, distributed relational model etc.. All of which you could find at "http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/s/Selinger:Patricia_G=.html"

She explains the people with whom she had worked with and was instrumental for the relational model of databases. Which all resulted in we working here :)

She describes, her working with Toronto team gave her time for her children helping in work/life balance.

What was her secret of success ?

Women in technology ?

An inspirational read, I hope it inspires you as much as it has done for me.

Aura ..