ZebaAli
I spent four years inside Oracle's Server Technologies Group working on RDBMS 23ai and 19c — the database engine itself, not applications built on top of it. In April 2026 the Oracle India layoffs ended that chapter. I'm building in public: going deeper into distributed systems, Java internals, and system design — and writing about all of it. Including what it's like to be a woman doing this work.
For nearly four years I worked on the part of Oracle that most engineers never touch — the database kernel. Architecting Java frameworks that stress-tested Oracle RDBMS at 5 billion rows across RAC, Exadata, and Exascale. Resolving Fortune 500 production escalations — kernel failures that crash banks at 3am. Building the first parameterized vector search benchmarking engine in the team — adopted as standard across Oracle RDBMS engineering groups. That work is invisible by design. I'm making it visible here.
Oracle India Pvt. Ltd.
Member of Technical Staff (MTS, IC2) · Server Technologies Group · Oracle RDBMS 23ai & 19c · Noida
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Architected Java concurrency frameworks stress-testing Oracle RDBMS at 5B rows across RAC, Exadata, and Exascale — surfacing deadlocks, MVCC edge cases, and kernel failures that fed into RDBMS 23ai hardening.
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Built Oracle's first parameterized vector search benchmarking engine — 500+ HNSW/IVF workloads measuring p50/p95/p99 latency, recall@k, and throughput at 5B-row scale, adopted as the standard across RDBMS engineering teams.
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Resolved 10+ Fortune 500 P1 escalations (ORA-600/ORA-7445 kernel failures) and owned 4 RDBMS features end-to-end, shipped across the 19RU, 23RU, and 23ai releases.
Wabtec Corporation
Software Engineer Intern
Built Java backend data pipelines and MS SQL Server integrations for rail logistics workflows. Developed MDM automation using Informatica PowerCenter.
Database Stress Testing Framework
github.com/zebacodes/db-stress-framework ↗Configurable Spring Boot REST service for stress-testing any JDBC-compatible database — concurrent thread executor, real-time TPS and p50/p95/p99 latency metrics via WebSocket dashboard, transaction pattern simulation, PDF/JSON report generation. Productized from 4 years of Oracle concurrent execution engineering at 5B row scale on Exadata and RAC.
Vector Search Benchmarking Platform
github.com/zebacodes/vector-search-benchmark ↗Spring Boot REST service benchmarking HNSW vs IVF vs Flat vector search on pgvector — measuring recall@k, p50/p95/p99 latency, index build time, and memory across dataset scales. Tunable HNSW and IVF parameters. Built on real Oracle HNSW/IVF production knowledge at 5B rows.
Oracle Let Me Go. Here's What 4 Years in RDBMS Engineering Taught Me.
MVCC: How Oracle and PostgreSQL Both Implement It — And Where They Diverge
What It Was Actually Like Being a Woman in Oracle RDBMS Engineering
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Backend engineering · Building in public · Women in tech