Healthcare IT professionals should learn oracle

As a healthcare IT professional be it developer, tester, dba, business analyst, support engineer, analytics engineer, healthcare big data scientist to name a few all these professions depend on healthcare information. Healthcare information is stored in a database. In most traditional systems database being made use of is either RDBMS like Oracle, SQL Server upto today's big data getting supported in mongoDB, Cassandra and such NoSQL databases. With majority in mind lets take a quick look at different tools form Oracle corporation that are extensively used in healthcare arena to start with: 1) Oracle database - Starting with Oracle 7 until upto latest Oracle 12c most healthcare organizations have started adopting Oracle database as preferred database backend to store, organize, retrieve and display data. Basic skills related to oracle database including clients like sqlplus, SQL developer are preferred client tools to access oracle database 1.1) If you are a developer connectivity drivers like JDBC, OBDC etc is being used depending on if the environment is Java, .NET etc will be used as part of code to connect to database, process procedures/functions/such database objects and process the data 1.2) As a tester you will be mostly involved with product validation from front end. However, basic sql skills with ability to access backend is needed and expected out of many testers/software quality assurance professionals these days. They also make use of sqldeveloper, sqlplus etc. As they try to access database directly as a security measure some healthcare organizations demand the creation of read only access account by DBA's and include members of testing team as part of this user profile 1.3) DBA the core database professional who is 200% responsible for making sure database is up, running, available for accessing patient information all the time performs lots of tasks starting with database installation, upgrade, maintenance, monitoring the database, ensure high availability starting with basic backup, restore, recovery, until upto advanced solutions like RAC , dataguard, golden gate to name a few. They provide 24x7 database support on rotation basis 1.4) Healthcare Business analyst is someone who knows the healthcare business with IT knowledge including database. They act as liasion between clients and development. Most business analysts report to project managers and will need to perform first level of testing of product before final release. So, database knowledge comes handy 2) Online Analytical Processing aka OLAP - The online analytic processing tool from Oracle helps with analysing the data and reporting the information in database. OLAP establishes connectivity with database and creates analytic cubes 3) Report developer - Healthcare organizations use tools like crystal reports, SQL Server Reporting Services, core PL/SQL (or) T-SQL functionality etc to access database and generate reports. The most common package utl_file is used to create files like csv report from database using PL/SQL tools on the fly 4) Oracle DICOM (Digital Imaging and communications in medicine)- As a DICOM professional if you are looking for support from Oracle, now oracle comes with its proprietory Oracle DICOM support to be used by DICOM developer. DICOM protocol along with imaging physics is the basic requirement expected out of some imaging developers 5) Vendor Neutral Archive aka VNA Professional - With emerging trends in healthcare VNA the vendor neutral archive stores and transfers data across disparate vendors. This implementation is heavily used in canada, UK clients