Richmond Shee (Olathe, KS) is a Senior Database Architect for Sprint Corporation, with more than 14 years of RDBMS experience, including 8 years working with Oracle databases. Richmond has also spent 2 years working with the Oracle Core Technology Group. He oversees the Performance Consultation Team, mentors DBAs and helps set the direction for implementing Oracle RDBMS technology throughout the company. Richmond leads the tuning efforts on all of Sprint’s most critical databases. Among his many accomplishments, he pioneered the use of the Oracle Wait Interface at Sprint. He also invented a patent-pending wait-based tuning tool. This tool is being deployed throughout Sprint Corporation & Sprint PCS. He frequently speaks at the Kansas City OUG, contributes to the Oracle-L listserver, and volunteers his time by mentoring DBAs in the Kansas City area.

K. Gopalakrishnan (Gopal) is an award-winning coauthor ("Oracle Author of the Year 2005"-Oracle Magazine) of Oracle Wait Interface (Oracle Press). He also authored Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters also from Oracle Press (Nov 2006). He has published articles in various international Magazines and is recognized as one of the leading database performance tuning experts in the world. Oracle Technology Network also recognizes him as an Oracle ACE. Gopal has worked with several of the biggest and busiest databases on the planet and has deep experience in the performance management and tuning of very large online transactional databases.

Kirtikumar Deshpande (Kirti Deshpande) has been working in the Information Technology field for over 20 years, including more than seven years as an Oracle DBA. Although a Biomedical Engineer by profession, he has chosen Information Technology as his career. He currently works with Verizon Information Services as a Senior Oracle Database Administrator and is a frequent contributor on the Oracle-L and LazyDBA listservers. He can be reached at kirti_deshpande64hotmail.com.