About Me

Hi, I'm Nikhil Kotak, an Oracle ACE Pro and an Oracle & PostgreSQL DBA/SRE based in Singapore.

I have been working with database technologies for more than 12 years, primarily across Oracle Database, Oracle RAC, Data Guard, RMAN, performance tuning, backup and recovery, high availability, troubleshooting, and database reliability and automations.

Over the years, my role has gradually expanded beyond traditional database administration into Site Reliability Engineering, automation, cloud database services, operational resilience, and production reliability.

Today, I work across technologies including Oracle Database, PostgreSQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Cache for Redis / Azure Managed Redis, MongoDB, and other emerging database platforms.

Why I Started Learn DBA

I started Learn DBA : A Life Long Learning Experience as a place to document technical notes, troubleshooting observations, useful commands, database behaviour, and lessons that I wanted to remember and share with other DBAs.

The blog has grown over the years, but the idea behind it has remained the same:

Learn something, test it, understand why it works, and share it with other database professionals..

How I Write Technical Articles

My aim is not to rewrite product documentation.

When I write about a database problem, I try to approach it the same way I would investigate it as a DBA:

What is the symptom?
What evidence do we have?
Which database component is involved?
Which command, view, log, or metric should we check?
What does the output actually mean?
What should we investigate next?

Where relevant, I also try to explain the reasoning behind a troubleshooting step instead of simply listing commands.

Database problems are rarely solved by running one query copied from the internet. Understanding why a database behaves a certain way is much more valuable.

Oracle and PostgreSQL

Oracle has been the core of my database career, particularly around Oracle RAC, Data Guard, backup and recovery, performance troubleshooting, patching, and database reliability.

Over time, I have also worked extensively with PostgreSQL and Site Reliability Engineering practices.

One of the areas I particularly enjoy writing about is the difference between Oracle and PostgreSQL from an operational DBA perspective.

Although both are relational databases, concepts such as MVCC, recovery, replication, memory management, high availability, logging, and troubleshooting can work very differently.

For DBAs moving between the two platforms, understanding those differences is often more useful than simply learning commands.

Oracle ACE Pro

I am honoured to be part of the Oracle ACE Program as an Oracle ACE Pro.

The Oracle ACE Program recognizes members of the Oracle technical community who contribute knowledge and experience through activities such as technical articles, blogs, presentations, community participation, and knowledge sharing.

Being part of the Oracle community has given me the opportunity to continue learning from other database professionals while sharing what I have learned throughout my own career.

My Oracle ACE profile:

Oracle ACE – Nikhil Kotak https://ace.oracle.com/ords/ace/profile/nikhilkotak

A DBA Never Stops Learning

Database technology continues to change.

Traditional DBA responsibilities now overlap with cloud platforms, automation, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, observability, security, and AI-enabled database capabilities.

But one thing has not changed:

When a production database has a problem, someone still needs to understand what the database is actually doing.

That curiosity is what keeps me interested in database technology.

There is always another wait event to understand, another execution plan to investigate, another recovery scenario to test, or another database feature worth exploring.

That is also where the name of this blog comes from:

Learn DBA : A Life Long Learning Experience