The spotlight is on Javier de la Torre Medina, Cloud Solutions Engineer, Oracle, Spain.

Oracle Black Belts help customers with Oracle Cloud solutions by acting as trusted technical advisors, from discovery and planning to implementation and optimization. As deep experts, they work closely with pre-sales, sales, and product management to satisfy the business and technical requirements of customers and prospects. Among other tasks, they build presentations, deliver live demos and put together Proof of Concepts (PoCs), using sample customer data to prove how Oracle will solve their business pains.

Javier de la Torre Medina is an Autonomous AI Lakehouse Black Belt based in the Málaga TechPark, Spain, opened by Oracle in 2010 and now home to more than 600 employees from 23 different countries.

De la Torre Medina joined Oracle in 2002 as a technology sales consultant, progressing through roles as big data sales consultant, and big data and cloud architect, to his position today as Master Principal Autonomous AI Lakehouse Black Belt. He specializes in Oracle Autonomous Database and its AI capabilities.

Javier holds a master’s degree in Information Systems Management from the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid and a bachelor’s degree in Technical Engineering from Universidad de Córdoba. He is an Oracle Autonomous Database 2025 Certified Professional and a recently appointed Oracle Academy Ambassador for Spain and beyond.

Oracle Academy: Congratulations on becoming an Oracle Academy Ambassador. What is your specific area of focus?

Javier de la Torre Medina: It’s all about data, how to get the most out of it, how to transform data into business success. My day job involves helping customers to build data architectures that bring maximum value to their organizations. My special focus is the Oracle Autonomous Database (ADB), Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse and Oracle AI seamlessly working inside both to eliminate manual tasks and simplify data management.

I make frequent presentations around these products and will be doing more. There are some tremendous new tools available for simplifying coding and data management, things like Select AI, natural language processing, Oracle LiveLabs, Autonomous Database Data Studio and much more.

Oracle Academy: Impressive. Why did you accept the role of Ambassador and what will your approach be?

Javier de la Torre Medina: I love inspiring people, explaining concepts, simplifying the complex — so this new hat fits me perfectly! It ties in directly with my job, which is to help customers get maximum value out of data. By showing students what I do and how I do it, they will get to see real-life usage of what they learn through Oracle Academy courses.

As Ambassador, my goal is to show students why data is the key to competitive advantage and how Oracle solutions can be leveraged for success. I want to share my years of helping hundreds of clients unlock the true power of their data, making data work smarter. Whether it’s building robust data architecture, working with big data and NoSQL, or implementing Oracle Database solutions, I’ve been in the trenches solving complex challenges.

I’ll be putting myself in the students’ shoes — because students don’t always have visibility to what’s going on inside a customer, or inside Oracle either. I remember realizing, when I did my own internship at Oracle in Spain, that there were so many things at play that I could not see in depth from my university. So, as Ambassador I’ll be combining technical demos with storytelling about customers, about Oracle and the impact that Oracle has made on the world these past five decades. It’s a game changer and always has been.

Oracle Academy: What activities have you performed to date?

Javier de la Torre Medina: I like to address events and audiences that are open to new ideas and trends. For the past three years I have delivered a Master Class on AI and Data Management to LaSalle University Barcelona campus, an Oracle Academy member since 2021. I also attended an Oracle expert summit session in Berlin, where I spoke on Big Data. I was proud to be perceived as a person with lots of knowledge, compared to people with 30-40 years of career!

I contributed to an Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast, talking about the role of AI Data Engineers and the impact of Oracle Autonomous Database (ADB) on cloud data management. I touched on taking the administrator out of the DBA role because ADB eliminates the tedious tasks of patching, backups, upgrades and so forth, which are all taken care of inside the database. Data engineers can now focus solely on the data.

I also joined the Autonomous Database Learning Lounge for a session on Vibe Data Engineering to explain how ADB uses AI prompts to deliver revolutionary speed and agility across the entire data lifecycle. I covered Select AI, a natural language interface with wide-ranging SQL translation and generation capabilities, that pushes the boundaries of data interaction to new levels.

Last year, I assisted a hackathon run by Oracle Academy member University of Malaga by providing participants with access to Oracle Cloud accounts, allowing students to create Oracle ADB instances and virtual machines for creating a mobile-friendly web application to manage and distribute water resources efficiently.

I have planned a number of cloud coaching clinics and I’m open to requests to talk to faculty and students when required.

Oracle Academy: Very active! You must be getting good feedback.

Javier de la Torre Medina: That’s right. People tell me I am very good at telling stories, presenting, making things practical and easy, providing good examples, highlighting the business value of data. Last year I was voted 11 out of 200 top presenters in the Favikon Influencer rankings. On LinkedIn I have chalked up one million views! This feedback nurtures me. I didn’t see myself as a good speaker, but I discovered that I like sharing and getting people enthusiastic. Again, being an Ambassador endows me with latitude for more of this.

Oracle Academy: Wow, a million views on LinkedIn…!

Javier de la Torre Medina: Yes, I use LinkedIn, which reaches a broad business-focused audience, to create noise about the Autonomous Database. Hitting that milestone makes me extremely proud. My posts are designed to have a “wow” effect: Highly visual content, short and sweet with plenty of colorful graphics, video teasers, and relevant links to all my presentations. It seems to work. It’s important to make things appealing and simple to grasp.

Oracle Academy: if you could give one piece of advice to students, what would it be?

Javier de la Torre Medina: My advice to students would be to say that whilst cloud computing and AI have exploded across the world, it’s vital to stick to fundamentals. Things are changing fast, but the underlying architecture and best practices of good data strategy are the same. Cloud has more flexibility and is more cost efficient, but the architecture is not going to change. So, number one, embrace the principles of databases as taught by Oracle Academy, because those are the bedrock of data management, whether on premise or in the cloud with AI.

Secondly, SQL is really powerful. It is a standard everywhere — SQL for Json, SQL for relational databases, SQL for graph — for pretty much everything. So those would be my two recommendations: Get as much knowledge as possible about data architecture and the power of SQL.

Oracle Academy: Thank you. Lastly, what is your life like outside of Oracle?

Javier de la Torre Medina: Well, it too has changed. I have recently become a father of a beautiful baby girl. That’s my new hobby!

Otherwise, I am a fan of Crossfit. Not everyone knows Crossfit, which was created in the USA in the ‘90s and adopted by the emergency response teams such as firefighters. It combines aerobic exercises, calisthenics, and weightlifting. It is a high intensity workout, which I do four times a week at 7 a.m., before the heavy lifting of databases!

My wife and I also love the Málaga region and city, discovering good restaurants, new places, a relaxed life.

Thank you, Javier de la Torre Medina, for volunteering to be an Oracle Academy Ambassador.