Brian E. Dick
11 Wedgewood Drive
Cumberland, RI 02864
401-334-4064
bdick@cox.net

To see the details of my career click on one of these links for my full resume.    Doc    PDF

Skill Summary

SS - Sql Server    Syb - Sybase    Ora - Oracle    PB - PowerBuilder    Win - Windows

Experience

I seek a position as an application developer. I design and implement Client/Server systems. I also develop efficient database queries and stored procedures. I am a valuable asset to a project team as a consultant, mentor, technical lead, designer and developer.

Most of my development experience over the last ten years has been with PowerBuilder and C++, although I recently had the opportunity to do some Java work, too. But these languages were often supplemented with other languages to provide a complete solution. SQL is my number one supplemental language. I have written countless queries and stored procedures for Oracle, Sybase and SQL Server.

One of the standard interview questions for a consultant is "How do you facilitate knowledge transfer?" My answer is: Automate and Document. First, I simplify the job tasks by using a scripting language such as Windows batch, Unix ksh and csh, VB for Applications or one of the many others I know. Then second, I document the automated procedures using UML, database schema diagrams, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. In many cases I present my work with PowerPoint.

Currently I am writing reports and doing some simple descriptive statistics with SAS. My client, Veristat, out sources clinical trial programming for the pharmaceutical industry. Since last March I have done jobs for several different clinical studies and have written over 1000 SAS programs. There are a lot of similarities between the different clinical studies, so I use "copy and paste" and "save as" extensively. Yet, each study also has nuances that require custom programming.

Sonus Networks manufactures telephone switches that run on Solaris 8 and are managed through a WebLogic application server. For future releases of their product they wanted to isolate their application logic from the database. So, I developed a Java class library for storing and retrieving Java objects in an Oracle database.

Network Engines manufactures rack mount computers for the telecommunications industry. They ship these computers pre-configured with a selection of operating systems, web servers,  application servers, and other options. I worked on a new product development for a database network appliance that would be pre-configured with Oracle, Sybase, or SQL Server. To test the database configuration I developed a client/server application based on the popular TPC-C database benchmark. The client application, written in PowerBuilder, used multi-threading to simulate over 50 simultaneous users per physical client machine. I also utilized the object-oriented capabilities of PowerBuilder to encapsulate the application database access so that the RDBMS could be easily changed.

I learned how to work with Windows services at Network Engines, and I applied this new skill in developing a commercial product. The product, PBService, is a class library that allows developers to create PowerBuilder applications that can run as native Windows services. The class library is essentially a wrapper for a Visual C++ DLL that handles the service API functions. E. Crane Computing (www.ecrane.com) markets PBService. I continue to provide support for PBService.

My first opportunity to use Java was at Intel. They used a Java Swing application to manage security for their line of VPN routers. I wrote a database persistence layer for their application similar to ones I wrote for Network Engines and Sonus. But the majority of my time was spent writing stored procedures for their Sybase database. Their web application called these stored procedures to retrieve data for reports and graphs of performance statistics.

At John Hancock I was hired initially as a PowerBuilder contractor but eventually wound up to be a Sybase production support DBA. I worked on two projects, a work-flow application and a document management system. The work-flow application processed call center tickets and routed them through the resolution process. The document management system produced and tracked correspondence for claims in a class action lawsuit.

Healthcare Automation needed to move their DOS based patient management system to the Windows platform. I was hired as the technical lead for the new PowerBuilder version of the product that used Oracle as the database. Both PowerBuilder and Oracle were new products for their staff, so I spent lots of time training and mentoring the concepts of object-oriented and relation database design.

Waveland Software was another one of my commercial ventures. We produced a class browser called QuickView for PowerBuilder. I wrote QuickView in C++ using Sybase's Power++ development environment.

I worked on a sales and marketing data warehouse for Hasbro. The Sybase database implemented the typical star schema. I was responsible for writing stored procedures to aggregate the fact tables for different hierarchical dimensions such as product lines and organizational structure. 

Prior to Hasbro, I did back-to-back contracts with Fidelity Investments. During the first stint I developed a PowerBuilder application framework and several applications to manage the security and code tables for a Sybase database. Shortly after they hired me again to write a PowerBuilder application to track the investments of their executives in a SQL Server database.

I also developed a PowerBuilder application framework for Pepsi-Cola. We then used the framework to develop the front end for a SQL Server data warehouse that stored quality assurance statistics for their beverage products. In addition, I wrote a C++ DLL to handle the database portion of their InstallShield installation program.

Boston Edison hired me to build a prototype a PowerBuilder system to manage the corporate telephone directory in a Sybase database. We also used this database to automatically produce organizational charts.

I worked on two applications for Textron Financial. The first application was a port of their credit approval system from OS2 to a PowerBuilder Windows application. Textron had a "stored procedures only" data access policy, so I also spent a good amount of time writing store procedures for their Sybase database. The second application was a PowerBuilder call center and time keeping system that used a Sybase database. This system also could import and export project data with Microsoft Project.

At Fidelity Investments I developed a PowerBuilder data entry system to capture budget information for a Sybase database. The database was a data warehouse of operating data from all of the Fidelity companies. I also developed many stored procedures for variance analysis reporting.

The New England hired me as a DBA to verify their SQL Server database design for a claims processing system. Their design only needed a few minor adjustments, so they also had me write stored procedures for their reports. They were also beta testing a new application development product called PowerBuilder and needed some help building data entry screens.

Exxon was my first and only place of permanent employment. They hired me after I graduated from college. My first couple of projects were oil and gas economic forecasting systems written in Fortran and PL/I. Initially, these were file based systems, but eventually we migrated them to use an ISPF front end and DB2 database. I also did quite a bit of SAS data management and graphics.

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