Oracle ACE Associate ♠️ 2026 – Continuing the Journey

Alhamdulillah. I’m honored to share that I’ve been promoted to Oracle ACE Associate ♠️ as of September 2, 2026 less than six months after joining the Oracle ACE Program as an ACE Apprentice on March 17, 2026.

At 22nd June-2026, Recognized as Oracle ACE Apprentice globally. 

This isn’t just a badge on a profile page. It’s a responsibility to keep learning, keep documenting, and keep showing up for the Oracle community that has given me so much over the years.

The Journey: From Apprentice to Associate

The ACE Apprentice roadmap is built around three pillars: Learn, Use, Show Product Knowledge, Product Usage, Product Advocacy. It doesn’t reward talk; it rewards consistent, visible contribution over time, and that’s what the last six months looked like for me.

Between March and September, I published eleven technical articles grounded in problems I was actually solving in production not theory for its own sake:

• Oracle Data Guard & High Availability: a practical DBA guide
• Oracle Database upgrades from 11g to 19c planning, execution, and validation
• Oracle Database triggers, functions, procedures, and job scheduling
• A complete reference guide to database links
• A structured methodology for Oracle database health checks
• A practical RMAN guide for backup, restore, and disaster recovery
• Oracle APEX 26.2 installation and configuration with ORDS on Oracle 19c
• Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS): concepts, architecture, and configuration
• Building a Hire-to-Retire (H2R) solution in Oracle APEX
• Setting up a Windows Server guest VM for Oracle Database 19c in VirtualBox
• Oracle Forms evolution from client-server/Forms 4.5 to Forms 14c and modernization

NOTE: Above mentioned these articles are available at https://oraclesolutions.pk/

By the time the roadmap closed, all three pillars Knowledge, Usage, Advocacy stood at 100%. The promotion to Oracle ACE Associate ♠️ that followed on September 2 wasn’t a separate achievement so much as the natural next step after that.

After completion the ACE Apprentice Journey got certificate of recognation / Promotion as “Oracle ACE Associate ♠️”

Got this Certificate and Globally recognition and honored as my picture and profile mentioned on Login page of 

Oracle ACE Comunity mentionmed below

Also got Email from Oracle ACE Comunity  and honored by Oracle ACE Program Management by  warm welcome and appriciation,  mentionmed below

The Recognition & What It Represents

As a Database Administrator at Yaqoob Group of Companies, my day-to-day work spans Oracle Database administration, high availability and disaster recovery, and application development on Oracle APEX which is exactly why the topics above weren’t a stretch to write about; they were simply what I was already doing, written down properly.

My guiding principle through all of it has been simple: if I spend hours solving a problem once, writing it down properly means the next DBA who hits the same wall doesn’t have to spend those hours again.

Growing Through Mentorship

I didn’t get here on my own. Two people in particular shaped how I think about contributing to this community rather than just working quietly within it both Oracle ACE Pro ♠️:

• Syed Saad Ali, whose own journey and guidance showed me what it looks like to treat community contribution as a responsibility rather than a checkbox.
• Malik Sikandar Hayat, whose continuous support and knowledge-sharing kept me writing and publishing even when it would have been easier not to.

Their mentorship taught me that the real question isn’t “how do I advance,” but “how many people can I help move forward with me.”

That’s the mindset I want to carry into this next stage supporting other Oracle professionals & ACE Apprentices the way I was supported.

Supporting the Oracle Community in Pakistan

None of this happens without a community to build it in. I want to specifically recognize the Pakistan Oracle Users Group (PkOUG) and the ERPStuff Community for giving Pakistani Oracle professionals a real platform to learn, share, and be seen.

If you’re an Oracle professional in Pakistan sitting on knowledge you don’t think is “impressive enough” to write about a script, a troubleshooting note, a config you finally got working write it anyway and share it with PkOUG or ERPStuff. That’s exactly the pattern that got me here, and it’s how we grow the community’s capacity together, not just our individual profiles.

 

Muhammad Ilyas Awan

Oracle ACE Associate ♠️ | Database Administrator | Oracle Techno-Functional Consultant | ERP Solution Arcitect 
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/ilyas8284 
Email: ilyas8284@outlook.com
Whatsapp: +92-336-963-8284