Data Services Newsletter

Volume 14 : No 3 : Winter 2012

Sue Schoch - Senior Software Engineer - Retires

After twenty-three and a half years of service to IRIS, Sue Schoch has retired from IRIS to pursue new challenges. For all of this time, she has served as the core of IRIS DMC operations, first by building up key elements of the Data Management System that we all know and love, then maintaining and growing a core database and archive catalog from megabyte scale to terabyte scale in size.

Sue Schoch

Having joined IRIS DMC after a stint with the Internal Revenue Service, she began work on implementation of the prototype Data Management System when it was still located at the University of Texas, forging what became known as the DIRTS system, backed by a RAIMA database engine, which tracked the loading and storage of hundreds of source data tapes and allowing their efficient retrieval and delivery to users on request.

In the mid-nineties, when IRIS DMC was firmly planted at the University of Washington in Seattle, having grown its data archive to several terabytes in size, Sue was instrumental in migrating the database technology to the enterprise-scale Oracle® system. This transition was difficult, but Sue took the lead in bringing IRIS DMC to a whole new level of growth and functionality.

Sue continued her exploits in bringing CORBA services to the masses with implementations for the Data Handling Interface, first served from IRIS DMC, but soon provided from many other institutions up to present day. Sue proved to be an avid developer in C, Java®, and PLSQL, as well as scripting languages for the data servers as well as the web. The functionality of the SeismiQuery web tool has much of Sue’s fingerprints on it.

Reaching a new century of technologies, Sue saw IRIS transition from tape to RAID disk, CORBA to web services, and enterprise servers to virtual machines. She was instrumental in our latest migration of Oracle from Solaris to Red Hat, the latter of which is fully in production.

As Sue pursues new interests as her own boss, she leaves behind a grateful staff at the DMC who will enjoy the fruits of her achievements for many years to come.

by Rob Casey (IRIS Data Management Center)

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