BIOGRAPHY
HIGHLIGHTS OF JOHN AVIA'S CAREER
 

 
John Avia began his career as a programmer/analyst at GEICO Direct Insurance Company in 1989.  He was engaged on many large scale projects using the IBM mainframe, CICS, DB2 and IMS.  In 1992 he became a DB2 and Oracle database administrator.  He worked on many projects related to performance tuning and database conversion.  It was these projects that allowed John to hone his unique SQL tuning skills.  

In 1993, John was introduced to the PeopleSoft suite of solutions working at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee.  John worked on implementing the PeopleSoft Version 3 Financial suite of applications at BCBST.

In 1995 John moved on to National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) in Boca Raton Florida.  He worked as a DB2 and Oracle DBA maintaining large scale client server systems.  John worked on getting the best performance possible and made many recommendations on improving performance.

   

 

 

 

 

 Later this year John began a contract at Public Service Company of North Carolina, now part of the SCANA Corporation.  John worked on the implementation of PeopleSoft HRMS and Financials systems.  He served as a DBA, System Administrator and Developer.  John Spent three years on this contract, assisting with several PeopleSoft upgrades including PeopleSoft 5 to 6 and 6 to 7.  John also worked on several studies helping the corporation decide which is the must optimal database platform to use with PeopleSoft.

In 1998 John moved on to his next  contract at Piedmont Natural Gas, Inc.  John performed many tasks at PNG including System Administrator, DBA and Mentor.  At PNG, John assisted with the Implementation of PeopleSoft HRMS and Financials.  John also assisted this customer with a double upgrade of these suites.  John contributed to many fit gap sessions as a technical contributor.  One stand out contribution at PNG was the tuning of the PeopleSoft Asset Management  module.  This module 

 has been historically known as a bad performer.  John was able to use his tuning skills to enable this system to execute in a acceptable amount of time.

In the late summer of 2000, John rolled off of PNG and began his biggest challenge yet.  Working on two contracts simultaneously!  John worked at Cox Enterprises Monday through Thursdays and at the City of Charlotte on Fridays and some Weekends.  

John performed many of the same tasks at these two clients as he has been performing for the  last ten years. At the City of Charlotte, John Assisted with implementing PeopleSoft HRMS including the Time and Labor module. John applied many patches and fixes and tuned several badly performing SQL statements that were contained in PeopleCode.

At Cox Enterprises, John worked on the implementation of a large Payroll Data Repository.  This data warehouse was contained in the same database has their PeopleSoft database and written using PeopleTools.  John also was involved in the implementation of PeopleSoft eRecruit v8.3 and the 7.5 to 8.3 upgrade.