Billy Scotti

James Madison University

CS Internship Paper

Dr. Ralph Grove

When preparing to apply for internships I first had to revise and update my resume. I took this task very seriously because unless the employers called me back this would be nearly the only interaction that I would be able to have with the companies that I was applying to work for. I was able to use skills that I had learned in Into to Technical and Scientific Communication class (TSC 210), to assist in preparing the resume. It helped me figure out what information to include, how to separate information, how to properly use white space on the page and most importantly it provided me a guideline on what type of format to use to effectively show the information on my resume.

When first starting to search for available internships for the summer I referenced a few family friends I knew of that are involved in the computer science / information technology field who might have know about internship possibilities. From these references I was able to get my resume out to about six different companies with available internships for the summer. I eventually heard back from two of these companies, Time Inc in New York City and CMP Media LLC in Manhasset NY, for interview possibilities.

Both Time Inc. and CMP Media LLC gave me an interview over the phone. At both Time Inc and CMP the interviews were very similar, they both were asking standard questions like what classes I had taken to better my understanding of what would be taking place at the internship and they also asked questions about myself like what I was involved in at school and why I thought I would make a good employee at the company. Both of the internships that I was interviewing for were going to be working with the Database Administrator so I was able to explain to them that I had taken CS 274 – Introduction to Database design and Application and that I was very familiar with PL/SQL. I was also able to explain to them that I had an internship the previous summer in which I dealt with users on Unix systems and trouble shooting their problems when they occurred. I was able to explain to both companies how having the internship the summer before exposed me to the business world, taught me how to act and dress in a business environment and that it improved my interpersonal skills in the workplace substantially.

I was contacted by Charlie Ferretti from CMP Media for a follow-up interview in which they asked me more about what I was intending to get out of the internship and they explained who I would be working with and what my main responsibilities would be if I was chosen for the internship. In the end I was contacted again by CMP Media and I was informed that I landed an internship with them in their Manhasset office in New York.

CMP Media LLC is a leading high-technology business-to-business multimedia company that provides essential information and integrated marketing services to the technology and healthcare professionals worldwide. Capitalizing on editorial strength, CMP Media is uniquely positioned to offer marketers and advertisers comprehensive media solutions tailored to meet their individual needs. Their products and services include newspapers, magazines, Internet products, research, education and training, trade shows and conferences, direct marketing services and custom publishing. CMP Media’s product offerings provide simultaneous branding opportunities that reach vast audiences. Our quality editorial covers industry news targeting the builders, sellers and users of technology. In the healthcare field, professionals turn to the CMP Healthcare Group for job-critical information and education. (Description taken from www.cmp.com)

My supervisor Charlie Ferretti, the supervisor for system administration hired me, but I was mainly going to be working with one of the Database Administrators, Jacob Samuel, for my everyday tasks. I was hired for eight weeks working forty hours a week, Monday-Friday 9-5:30. In the department that I worked in, Information Technology, there were six people working under the same supervisor as myself, two system administrators, two database administrators, one data center operator and myself. CMP has thirteen offices in the United States and remote offices overseas in Asia, Europe and Latin America this means that there always needs to be support for the system and having so many offices makes the pace of business in the company fast paced and constant.

When first hired I was given a list of things that I would be responsible for on a daily basis on top of any projects that would be given to me at a later date. My daily responsibilities were creating and maintaining users and their roles, assigning privileges and allocating tablespace in the Oracle database. I was also responsible for monitoring the database backup every night and the restore that took place the following morning and if needed the recovery of the entire database or just individual tables or records from backups if needed.

My first major project while at CMP involved installing patches to the Oracle 10.7 system to bring it back up to “Mandatory Patch Levels.” This had to be done because version 10.7 of Oracle Applications was in June 2000 replaced by Oracle 11i. Oracle recently extended client support of version 10.7 until December 2002 this only includes those instances running version 8.0.6 and up of the underlying database. CMP was currently running version 7.3.4 of the database, which was de-supported by Oracle as of December 31^st 2000. The product was on “Extended Maintenance Support”(EMS) until December 31^st 2003. Consequently though, Oracle will no longer develop and release patches and program corrections and CMP was essentially running the accounting system on a database that is generally unsupported by the manufacturers. The Oracle Financials instance being run by CMP that was becoming de-supported was “inherited” from Miller Freeman when they were taken over by United News and Media, the parent company of CMP Media. The application was migrated from San Francisco to Manhasset in November 2000. In order to facilitate the migration of the application the decision was made to “freeze” the application and no patches, other than tax related ones have been applied since the migration. If a functional problem were to occur, and a fix in the form of an Oracle patch would be required to fix it, they would have to apply a large number of patches before the solution from Oracle could even be implemented. To solve this problem it was my job to first apply approximately thirty patches to a development Oracle instance, then test the effectiveness of the application of the patches and document the process so that I could be repeat the same process on the production Oracle instance. First the patches were located and then one at a time applied to the development system and their effects on the system and their installation procedure were documented so that if anything went wrong when working on the production box it would be easily traced back to through the documentation of the test runs on each of the patches. Once the testing on the development box was done we estimated approximately how long the entire process was going to take to apply the thirty patches to the production Oracle instance. We estimated that it would take approximately 4 hours to apply the patches and conduct enough testing to ensure that it was safe to allow the users back onto the system. We emailed the effected people telling them that we would be taking down the system so that system maintenance could be performed on it. We took the system down at approximately 8am on a Saturday and applied the patches in about two and a half hours and were done with the testing of the database and it’s applications in approximately 4 hours.

Another one of my major responsibilities was to check to make sure that the nightly backup process and nightly refresh had run correctly and then to perform the daily morning refresh on the production system. CMP uses the EMC Enterprise Storage management system to store data that runs off of HP K-Series systems running HP-UX. The EMC is connected to the systems using a fiber channel, which makes data retrieval just as fast as if it was running off of a local drive. The EMC works by continuously writing all data that it receives into two different places, the first place that it writes to is the “Standard Disk” the other place is the “Business Contingency Volume” or BCV. The simultaneous writing of both volumes is what makes the EMC’s architecture so powerful by allowing it to detach the BCV and almost instantaneously copy it over to the development instance so that a backup to tape can then be taken from there, which in turn is the same exact data as the production instance. The EMC allows CMP the most reliable way of performing backups on a Oracle instance because Oracle cannot be directly backed up, unless the database is brought down (cold backup), so the BCV’s are used to run backups off of the development system which is not as critical to have available for users 24 hours a day. When doing my daily morning check of the backup from the night of May 19^th I found that the backup of the oracle system and data had not completed. Upon further inspection of what had happened the night before, we found that the backup did not finish because the redo logs had a problem, we first cleared up the problems with the redo logs and then proceeded to finish the backup manually by using the EMC software. First we made sure that the standard disk and the BCV were synchronized after the problems from the night before. Then we split the BCV off of the production disk(System Name: Snowmass) and mounted it on the development disk (System Name: Wolf) and then synchronized them together using the redo logs from before the problem happened. Then we set up the tape backup off of the development system, Wolf. The tape backups at CMP are run using Storage Tec backup hardware and software and writes to DLT 5000 drives.

Although I was working on projects the entire time I was at my internship, my everyday tasks were always different depending on problems with the database or problems that users are having. For instance in my daily logs I can see that everyday there would be something that would come up that needed to be dealt with immediately meaning that I would have to put whatever project I was working on at the time and then work on the more eminent task. An example of this is one night Snowmass (Oracle production system) had problems with the nightly processing because of a problem with the swap space. This task was obviously more important to immediately solve than the project that I was working on at the time and needed my immediate attention. Other things that came up in my daily logs like this are restoring tables when users make errors and corrupt the data, security issues involving an audit trail on the database and putting up new users onto the oracle system which involves giving them rights and tablespace.

This internship showed me that I was able to use the knowledge that I had gained through my college career and apply it to the real business world situations that happen everyday. There were certain things that are needed in the business world that are not expected out of college students while in class as well, like being able to interact with a group of people to try and solve problems immediately when they arise. I think that this internship was very worthwhile for me because it let me see how computer science interacts with everyday business in a corporate environment and more importantly I was able to make very good contacts for when I will be looking for a job after I graduate from JMU in May.