The Data Warrior

RMOUG Training Days 2013 – Day 1

Unlike many conferences, today started off not with the keynote but with an actual session (probably some advanced psychology at work here). 🙂

I started off with John King’s session on Oracle 11g features that developers should know about. (He was going to talk about 12c but since it has not been released yet, he could not speak about it)

John King giving Session 1 at RMOUG 2013

John is a great speaker and gave us some very detailed information.

One very interesting piece to me, as a data modeler and data warehouse designer, was the addition of Virtual Columns. With this you can declare a virtual, calculated/derived column to be part of a table definition. With this you can define a calculation once and have it appear when querying the table without actually physically adding a column to the table. Looks promising.

John told us about lots of new things like Pivot, Unpivot, Results Cache, PL/SQL Results cache and Nth Value functions. Some of them are shown in the following pictures.

SQL PIVOT Example

Example of UNPIVOT

Another cool SQL Function: Nth Value

All neat options I did not really know about.

Next up was the keynote speech by Mogens Norgaard from Denmark. Mogens is an ACE Director, CEO of his own consulting firm, and a brew master. Interesting guy.

He showed up in his bathrobe to talk to us all about how the smartphone is taking over  the world and all the cool apps you could build (and some he has built).

Mogens Norgaard in his keynote best.

Next was my turn – my first session of the conference – 5 Ways to Make Data Modeling Fun (based on a blog post).

I was pleasantly surprised that I had 40-50 people attend and most stayed for the whole talk. It was a good, interactive session. My good buddy Jon Arnold assisted me in administering some of the activities. It was great fun getting the attendees to actually collaborate on activities during a session.

Great participant collaboration during my talk

As promised, I did give out prizes for some of the activities (all branded Data Warrior LLC stuff).

Next was the ACE Director networking lunch where they put our names on tables so people could sit with us to ask questions (if they wanted too).

Networking Lunch

After lunch we some vendor sessions (which I skipped) and several panel discussions. These included the Women in Technology Panel and an Oracle Career Roundtable.

Women in Technology Panel

Oracle Careers Roundtable

Anyone notice that the Women in Tech had one male on the panel but the Oracle Career panel had no women? Just sayin’ folks…

Next I sat in for part of a session on Oralce TimesTem database for real-time BI. It turned out to be the same stuff I heard at Oracle Open World so I did not stay.

Last for my day at RMOUG was my joint session with Stewart Bryson on Data Vault and OBIEE. Unfortunately due to the late slot (5:15 PM) we had a very low turn out. 😦 But is was a good session as I discovered all the things Stewart learned trying to use the data vault model for virtualizing the data mart layer (in OBIEE). It was all very good and reinforced my belief that Data Vault is a great way to model an EDW and that non-data vault people could understand it and apply it to dimensional modeling (or that Stewart is really exceptional).

Adios for now.

Kent

P.S. Forgot to mention again that I will be conducting another morning Chi Gung class at & AM above the registration area. Please join!