Oracle Magazine names only one as the PL/SQL Developer of the Year at each Oracle Open World, and this year the award was given to Alex De Vergori of Betfair.  Oracle Magazine writes:

Developer works with 250,000 lines of PL/SQL code that deliver success.

Successful PL/SQL developers require more than just good technical knowledge, according to Alex De Vergori, Oracle Magazine’s PL/SQL Developer of the Year. 
 

“They also need fine attention to detail, a passion about what they’re doing, and a high degree of pride in the software that they’re producing,” says De Vergori, a database architect who channels those skills at Betfair, an online gaming company that pioneered the concept of betting exchanges in 2000. 
 

To manage customers’ bets, De Vergori and the Betfair team have created a core betting engine and business logic that encompass more than 250,000 lines of PL/SQL code. The Betfair solution runs on Oracle Database using distributed databases around the world and an Oracle data warehouse running Oracle Real Application Clusters. Betfair also uses Oracle Coherence for its in-memory distributed data caching requirements, Java for its middle tier, and Ajax for its front-end applications. 
 

“We take in excess of five million transactions a day, and they all go straight through to the database, where those bets match with other transactions in real time,” says De Vergori. “At peak, we can easily see something like 1,000 bet transactions per second. With Oracle, our growth has been exponential, so that has enabled us to succeed in our market.”