Anne Charles

Database Administrator and Software Developer

Having a BS in Astronomy from the University of Arizona in Tucson, she decided not to go further in astronomy but to hang out around the periphery in computing which was quite a new field at the time. Her first computing job was handling satellite attitude at Goddard Space Flight Center where she met Phil. Since then she has lived and worked in California, England, La Palma, and now here in South Africa. Despite thinking of herself as a computer programmer, in recent years she tends to find herself involved with databases and web sites.

Her first exposure to the concept of databases was at Goddard in the 1970s, then a more sophisticated IBM version at the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco. So that when the Engineering Science Department in Oxford in the early 1980s needed to organise departmental information, she wrote a database system for them. There were no Open Source systems at the time and they were not willing to buy a commercial one.

At Starlink in the 1990s, she set up their database of documentation and software. Later she became a DBA at the Clinical Trial Service Unit in Oxford. Now at SAAO she administers the SALT database and supports the databases behind our web sites.