Alumnus Innovates the Future at Oracle

If you can think of a corporation with substantial data organization needs, chances are they use an Oracle product for at least some of their enterprise software. It’s also likely that some component of that database technology was created or improved by Kishy Kumar, director of engineering at Oracle, or members of his team.

Since graduating from Carnegie Mellon with a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering in 2013, Kumar has taken unmet database needs and problems faced by Oracle customers and transformed them into technically streamlined, profitable services and features offered by the company. 

When Oracle, the world’s largest database management company, transitioned to the cloud in 2016, Kumar developed infrastructures to ensure their database was the best running on the cloud. He pioneered the Resource Management of flash devices—or solid-state drives—and their caching to make the cloud’s usage of flash resources more efficient.

“Thanks to my patent on flash devices resource management, Oracle now gets a higher cost efficiency. It increases business on the cloud, and much of the cost savings and better performance gets passed on to our customers,” says Kumar. 

After tackling several such projects to improve Oracle’s database, Kumar was invited by his old friend and roommate at Carnegie Mellon to join the transactions team, where he continued to innovate. At the request of a large bank in India, he led the engineering of Priority Transactions, which prevents surges of small dollar-value charges and purchases from blocking the processing of much larger transactions.

Innovations like these prompted Kumar’s rise from an engineer to a principal engineer at Oracle. His transition from a manager to a director was aided by his solution for a major problem faced by developers: that relational databases like Oracle store data in rows, columns, and tables, while data in applications takes the forms of classes and objects. It’s tricky to transition between these structures without encountering scalability and performance problems for large scale enterprise applications.

That’s where JSON Relational Duality comes in. What started as a research problem for the database team ended up becoming a major feature offered by Oracle and the subject of a paper published in SIGMOD, one of the world’s leading data conferences. 

“We came up with this fundamental technology that allows applications to just treat their data as business objects and send those objects as JSON documents right to the database. The database then figures out the best way to store the data—the relational format,” Kumar says. “The engineers in my team are innovating in this space, and I’m really happy that this project started off as a simple developer project, and then it became so big.”

Another project Kumar is now leading will allow Oracle’s users to look back in time. His team is building flashback technologies that can track changes to data over time, giving Oracle many customers, like banks and insurance companies, who may need this type of information for auditing and regulations.

The team is looking to the future, too—they’re also developing features at the intersection of AI and data, particularly those that will help their users, like advanced data-centric application development and search functionality.

“Whatever gaps we have in the Oracle database, we’ll be able to overcome by making a headwind into AI,” says Kumar. “Right now, users spend a ton of time building search infrastructures. But they won’t have to spend that much time, because we’ll take care of them in the database.” 

As an engineer, Kumar operates on a philosophy of moving fast and not backing away from challenges. To the members of his team, he says, “Think about what you’re building, think about what you can deliver today.”

To current and prospective Carnegie Mellon students, he advises, “Go for something you think is hard. Everybody can solve simple problems, so you want to differentiate yourself. If you don’t do hard things early, then as you progress in your career, you don’t get many opportunities to do hard things.”

True to his word, Kumar recalled enjoying and thriving in the rigorous environment at Carnegie Mellon, whether studying for his computer systems course or building a platform simulator for Firefly sensor nodes as a research project under Anthony Rowe, the Siewiorek and Walker Family Professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Kumar has fond memories of batchmates playing video games and finding creative ways to sleep in the electrical and computer engineering lounge in Porter Hall, as well as meeting a fellow student who then became his wife, with whom he now has a daughter.

“I spent a year and a half in Pittsburgh that I cannot forget,” he says, “and the good part about Carnegie Mellon is that it keeps in touch with its alumni.”

Kumar is active with the alumni association and regularly attends west coast events hosted by the Tech and Entrepreneurship club. He has come to speak to students and the Carnegie Mellon database group about his work at Oracle, and helped mentor students and served as a judge for TartanHacks in February.

Before coming to the United States and studying at Carnegie Mellon, Kumar was building modeling software for satellite networks. He earned his undergraduate degree in electronics and communication engineering at the Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology in India, during which time he completed a six month internship with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).

“To actually be exposed to things like satellites—and a software on Earth that’s talking to those satellites—was amazing so early in my career,” reflects Kumar.

In 2023, his manager and mentors at ISRO landed the satellite Chandrayaan-3 near the moon’s south pole, making India the fourth country to land on the moon.

“Seeing my manager and the same set of people at ISRO who had guided me on my journey on the television was so motivating,” Kumar says. “Every day of my life, I see the successes of these people who I have been influenced by—the professors at Carnegie Mellon, the folks I’ve worked with on my current team, the alumni who have become CEOs of big companies—and it has been really transformative on my career.”