About the Authors

Salahaldin Juba has over than a decade of experience in the industry and academia, with a focus on database development for large-scale and enterprise applications. He holds a master's degree of science in environmental management with a distinction, and a bachelor's degree of engineering in computer systems. He is also a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD). 

He has worked mainly with SQL server, PostgreSQL, and Greenplum databases. He has developed applications for scientific communities to process GIS information in a distributed manner, and he has participated in many international projects and standards for image processing during his work in the academic sector.

As a software engineer, he works mainly with defining ETL processes with external parties, defining software solution, promoting SQL best practices, designing OLTP and OLAP application, scouting and evaluating new technologies, and providing training and consultation services.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my colleague Andrey Volkov for making this work possible. Also, I would like to thank all the people who provided support, especially the team at Packt for their great support and feedback with proofreading, design, comments, and remarks. I would also like to thank my family for their support despite all of the time that I had to devote to this book over them. Finally, very warm and deep thanks to my late father, Ikrayem Juba, for his utmost support, help, and guidance. 

Andrey Volkov has studied information systems in banking. He started his career as a financial analyst in a commercial bank. Using databases as a main tool in his work, he realized that querying the database directly and mastering SQL is much more efficient for ad hoc analysis than using any visual reporting software. He joined the data warehouse team, and after some time, he lead the team by taking the position of the data warehouse architect.

He has worked mainly with Oracle and used to develop logical and physical models of financial and accounting data, implement them in the database, develop ETL processes, and perform analytical tasks. He was also responsible for teaching the users how to use the data warehouse and BI tools. SQL training was also a part of that work.

After 10 years in the financial sector, he changed his field and now works as a senior database developer in a telecommunications company. Here, he works mainly with PostgreSQL databases, being responsible for data modeling and implementing physical data structures, developing stored procedures, integrating databases with other software components, and developing a data warehouse.

Having a lot of experience with both Oracle and PostgreSQL--the leading commercial and one of the most advanced open source RDBMSes--he is able to compare them and recognize and evaluate the key advantages of both of them. Working as a software developer and implementing different kinds of database applications, as well as working as a business analyst and using databases as a tool for analysis, let him learn and understand different database features in different use cases. This experience made him able and willing to work on this book.

I would like to thank my wife and son for their support and for letting me work on weekends and evenings. Big thanks to the editors team for their support, guidance, and organization. And most of all, I would like to thank the main author of the book, Salahaldin Juba, who invited me to work on the book, introduced me to the team, and, in fact, has done most of the work.