Haytham Ichahbane

I work on the Oracle APEX platform at Oracle. Day to day that means building features for the product itself, contributing to strategic enterprise applications that replace external software, and digging into the database when something is slower than it has any right to be.

Most of my professional energy goes into Oracle internals: execution plans, wait events, query rewrite, the boring craft of making SQL fast. I also built a CI/CD pipeline for APEX applications using SQLcl so we can ship database releases the same way the rest of the world ships code: version-controlled, reviewed, automated.

How I think about this work

Databases are interesting because they're where every abstraction eventually has to make peace with physics (disk, memory, locks, ordering). The closer I get to that boundary, the more I learn. The best systems I've worked on were the ones whose authors took performance seriously from the first design doc, not the ones that got "optimized" later.

On the side

I'm writing MeridianDB, a multi-model database engine from scratch in C++: row, columnar, vector, and graph storage sharing a single transaction, security, and metadata plane. The point is less the artifact than the practice: to understand storage trade-offs by living with them. I write the architecture decisions down before the code, and the first of those write-ups covers what each one cost.

Teaching and community

I give talks on Oracle APEX and Oracle Database, to working engineers, and to university students and faculty. It is the same material at a different altitude: practitioners want the edge cases and the war stories, students want to know why the database behaves the way it does at all.

I have also helped organize hackathons and learning events around Oracle Database, and I volunteer regularly with social and educational initiatives. Teaching is the fastest way I know to find out what I only think I understand.

Working together

If you are building something around Oracle APEX, PL/SQL, Python, C++, or database performance, and want a second pair of eyes (performance audits, CI/CD with SQLcl, architecture review, or just a conversation), say hello. Email is the fastest way.

Also happy to talk to people building serious database infrastructure, even when there is nothing concrete on the table.