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Archive for the category “Oracle”

14 Oct 2012

Hurry – Only 24 Hours Left to Get a Free Conference Registration

As I have written before, I love Oracle User Groups.

My two most favorite groups are the Oracle Development Tools User Group (ODTUG) and the Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group (RMOUG).

These two groups put on what are arguably the best annual conferences for users of Oracle technology – by users, for users.

Over the past 20+ years I have attended most of their events – and NEVER paid a registration fee.

This was very helpful when my boss said there was no money for training. I just said “I get in free”.

So would you like to attend one of these events for FREE?

All you have to do is submit an abstract to present a session. If you get selected, your registration fee is waived. This is worth over $1000.

But you have to hurry, the deadline for submission is Monday October 15th, 2012.

Details:

RMOUG Training Days is  February 11-13, 2013 in Denver, Colorado. (Right in the middle of ski season!)

Go here to submit an abstract.

ODTUG’s KScope event will be June 23-27th in wonderful New Orleans.

Go here to submit an abstract.

I have submitted multiple abstracts to both events.

So what are you waiting for – go submit now!

See you in Denver and New Orleans in 2013.

Kent

P.S. My Kindle ebook  started out as a user group presentation. No telling what you might do with your presentation.

Posted in ODTUG, Oracle, User Groups and tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
04 Oct 2012

Oracle OpenWorld 2012: Day 4

It was another beautiful, sunny day in San Francisco. I started the day, again, with some morning Chi Gung, then I enjoyed the morning keynote watching the big screen in Yerba Buena Gardens. Quite a pleasant way to listen to these talks.

It was a light day session-wise for me, but it did set off a few light bulbs.

The best session of the day (and for me the whole conference), was Gwen Shapira’s  (from Pythian) talk on building an integrated data warehouse with Hadoop. Gwen did a superb job of explaining what Big Data is and what it isn’t.

Her simple, and straightforward, definition:

Big Data Defined

The “cheaply” part seems to be the key. Oracle, and other databases, can handle really HUGE amounts of data. Petabytes in fact. But putting all that data into an RDBMS can cost a lot more money than having it stored in a less sophisticated file system on commodity drives (like HDFS).

So just having lots of data in your warehouse does not mean you have Big Data, you just have a Very Large Data Warehouse (VLDW).

She went on to expand the definition:

Big Data Defined 2

This part shed even more light on Big Data for me. This really helped clarify even more when you might be dealing with Big Data.

The talk was filled with lots of technical details, limitations,  and tools ( Sqoop, Flume,  Fuse-DFS) you can look at for integrating Hadoop into Oracle. Of course there are Oracle’s offerings as well, like Oracle Loader for Hadoop and Oracle Direct Connector for HDFS.

Gwen also gave use several use case examples that illustrated when to use Hadoop. Bottom line – learn to use Hadoop appropriately, not just because it is cool. With tech we can:

Make the impossible, possible. That might no make the possible easy.

If you went to OOW, find and download Gwen’s slides. And follow her on twitter (@gwenshap).

It was Big Data day for me. My other session was  Ian Abramson’s session on Agile & Data. Two of my favorite topics.

Ian discussed the Agile Manifesto and Big Data and how he has been able to use agile techniques to make his projects successful.

To start, here is his simple definition on Big Data:

What is Big Data?

Ian had a nice picture of the overall architecture as well:

Another Big Data Picture

To be successful in applying agile to data projects, Ian has determined the projects must be driven by data value – that is the sprint priorities are set based on the data that can best help the customer achieve their goals. To stay on track and keep velocity, it is important to have daily touch-points with the team members as well. Ian does a daily stand-up for 15 minutes.

Ian shared lots of details and answered a lot of my annoying questions too. He came up with a great tree graphic to illustrate important factors in having a high performance project:

Agile Tree

Again, find and download the slides once Oracle uploads them. In the meantime, follow Ian on twitter (@iabramson). A data-centric agilest is hard to find. For more on agile and data warehousing check out my classic white paper on the subject.

After Ian’s session I got to go to my first Oracle blogger meet up. It was nice to put more faces to names. Thanks to Pythian and OTN for sponsoring it.

Blogger Meetup

Then back to the hotel to pack and then stand inline (for an hour!) to get to the appreciation event and see Pearl Jam live. It was a good concert. Hard to beat live music outdoors!

Huge crowd for Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam Live!

Well that’s it for me on OOW2012. I am back home in Houston now and heading into the office tomorrow. Then I need to write another abstract or two for KScope13 and RMOUG TD2013. Then it will be time to plan for OOW2013 and The America’s Cup finals…

Nap time.

Kent

Posted in Data Modeling, Data Warehouse, Oracle and tagged , , | Leave a comment
02 Oct 2012
2 Comments

Oracle OpenWorld Day 3

Another one for the books…

As before you can see a bunch of my activities on twitter (@kentgraziano and #oow). I posted a few pictures throughout the day.

For the first time I got to watch two keynotes live without being in the cavern of a hall for four hours. Actually sat outside in the shade in Yerba Buena Gardens and watched it all on a really big screen.

Lots of  “cloud” talk from Oracle and its partners. CEO Larry E did a cool presentation or real-time analytics on 4.9 billion tweets gathered for the 5 days following the summer Olympic games. It was quite interesting to see the analysis of structured and unstructured data together in a drillable dashboard environment.

And it was…you guessed it…all in the cloud.

Big Data meets Big Iron

Pretty good slogan…guess for doing big data analysis you will need some pretty hefty hardware too…

Also attended two of Jeff Smith’s (@thatJeffSmith) presentations. One on collaborative model development with SQL Developer Data Modeler (my personal favorite) and one on SQL Developer Tips and Tricks (mostly tips).

Source control in SDDM

I also got in the tail end of a session on Pluggable Databases (PDB). Got some really nice summary slides (be sure to click on them and zoom so you can read them). Lots of great details on how PDB works and what it can and cannot do.

All about pluggable database

 

The details on PDB

After the second keynote it was over to the OTN Lounge for the first ever Tweet Meet. It was designed to let people meet the person behind the twitter handle. I think it was a good success with a great turn out. We even got one of the OTN guys to create his own twitter account so he could follow the Oracle Aces and Ace Directors more easily.

Finally dinner in North Beach with some friends at the Stinking Rose. This has become an annual tradition.

After dinner I did manage to catch the last set from Joss Stone performing in Union Square. That pretty much rocked. Glad I went.

Tomorrow night the BIG appreciation event: Pearl Jam (if I remember to pick up my wristband to get in).

Kent

 

Posted in Data Modeling, Oracle, SQL Developer Data Modeler and tagged , , , , ,
01 Oct 2012
2 Comments

Oracle Open World 2012: Day 2

A crazy group of us got the day off to a rip roaring start by heading down to the Dolphin Club on San Francisco Bay for an early morning swim in the bay. We cabbed it down and were greeted by a full moon over the Golden Gate Bridge.

Good Morning San Francisco Bay!

It was about 62 degrees (F) and the water was purported to be 59 degrees (F), even if it felt much colder. Here I am with my friend Debra Lilley (@debralilley) and few other crazy Oracle people, right before we took the plunge.

Ready to swim the bay!

Well, we all survived. You can see more pictures on twitter (@kentgraziano) and Facebook if you really feel the need.

Thanks to our buddy Chet (@oraclenerd) for setting this up and shaming us into doing it. It was quite invigorating and great way to start the day. (I did some Chi Gung on the beach too in order to prepare and to warm back up). Next year, we want ribbons or t-shirts or something for the effort.

After trekking back to the hotel and cleaning up, it was on to the conference.

Missed the keynotes but instead got to attend a real live press briefing (thanks to my blogger status) with Mark Hurd, the president of Oracle Corporation.

Mark Hurd Press Conference

It was great to be in the small room with all the reporters and bloggers getting the scope first hand from Mr. Hurd about Oracle’s strategy.

Oracle Strategy

The slide sums it up well – simplify IT by providing a complete stack of software and hardware and by giving customers complete choice. The choice now is host your own set up, use a private cloud, use a public cloud (hosted by Oracle), or use a hybrid model. You pick where and what you want hosted. You can mix and match and change your mind later. Sounds like a good idea. The next year or so will show us how will it works as a model.

Mark had a lot to tell us, much of which you will be able to read elsewhere in the main stream tech media. The thing that got my attention was the fact that Oracle  has spent over $14 billion (with a B) in the last two years on R&D, and over $6 billion in the last year on mergers and acquisitions. It is good to be Uncle Larry.

Most memorable quote from Mark: “we are the best”.

In other news…

The exhibit halls opened today. Bigger and more stuffed than before . A dizzying array of vendors hawking their wares. This year there is even an Airstream trailer and a very large Buddha in the hall (check my twitter stream for pictures of those).

OOW 2012 Exhibit Hall Opens

I spent some time in the hall today catching up with some product managers, learning about Oracle NoSQL, and even talked to the MongoDB guys (another NoSQL engine). So much information, so little time.

Went to a few sessions as well. Checked out Big Data Mining and RDF Graph Tools. Still trying to get my head around why you use these other technology approaches like RDF, NoSQL, and Hadoop. Spatial I get, since I did some GIS work in the past, but these others are harder.  Lots of companies seem to be including them in their overall solution architecture so there is something to it. I think I just have not run across a real need on my projects (at least not yet).

Like Oracle Endeca, there are a lot of advances in what Oracle is building in this space.

I am sure it will sink in eventually.

Oracle In-Database Analytics Platform

On the networking side, I attended the ODTUG reception this evening and manage to hear the last two tunes from Jimmy Cliff who was performing at the Oracle Music festival.

Tomorrow – chi gung in the morning, two keynotes and a few sessions. Then the first every Tweet Meet at OOW.

More to come…

Kent

 

 

Posted in Chi Gung, Oracle and tagged , , , , ,
30 Sep 2012

Oracle OpenWorld 2012: User Group Sunday

Yes, today was the first day for #OOW 2012. Affectionately known to many of us as User Group Sunday. Along with a ton of other activities, this is the day the various Oracle user groups get to “own” the agenda and put together the sessions they think Oracle customers, and their members, might want to see.

By users; for users.

For the 2nd year,  ODTUG asked me to curate their agenda. I was fortunate enough to “recruit” some great track leads who invited and vetted speakers and sessions to fill five rooms for most of the day. It was quite successful. (Thanks for the hard work guys.)

I attended quite a few myself and captured a few photos and thoughts. I was tweeting all day so you can also go to Twitter and search on @Kentgraziano to see my twitter stream.

After checking in at the User Group kiosk, I went to my first session given by Gwen Shapira and Robyn Sands who spoke about Flexible Design and Data Modeling. Great topic. They gave some very practical advice on do’s and don’t if you want to be more agile.

“Just good enough” does not scale.

Plan for Change

Worst Practices for Database Design

If you want some more modeling best practices, check out my ebook on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Check-Doing-Design-Reviews-ebook/dp/B008RG9L5E/.

Next I went on to see Kellyn Pot’vin and Stewart Bryson do a DBA vs Developers show down with No Surprises Development.

Release Planning Questions

Best advice – practice your deployments several times before going live…

Next: Guy Harrison talked about Hadoop, Bug Data, and Exadata. This was a very helpful intro talk about the space. I have been trying to wrap my mind around Hadoop, NoSQL, unstructured data, etc. and how we deal with it. Lots of great diagrams and examples to help explain.

Google’s Software Architecture

The Hadoop Ecosystem

Sigh…more to learn.

Next was a very interesting session by Mark Rittman about the Oracle Endeca software and how it can be used in a BI environment and how it compliments OBIEE.

This gives a quick view of what is involved with the Oracle Endeca Platform.

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery Platform

It looks like a very interesting platform that uses key value pairs to store the data. This enables search and analytics on some realtively unstructured data stores (i.e., not relational tables)

Final talk of the day (for me) was Jon Mead telling us about how they helped a customer develop event driven analytics using ODI and OBIEE and the Oracle Reference Architecture for data warehousing.

After all this, a  little break and networking, then on to the opening keynote.

It started with the Corporate Sr VP of Fujitsu  who talked about some cloud applications they have deployed in Japan. They have the Agricultural Cloud project to help farmers be more efficient and bring more and better crops to market. They also have developed a Healthcare Cloud Service for optimizing patient care and early diagnosis.

Very cool cloud applications.

Last up was CEO, Lary Ellison who announced Oracle 12c and Pluggable Databases (to support cloud deployments). I had heard about these (under NDA) at the Ace Directors meeting so now I can share a few pictures related to those since it is now public information.

Oracle 12c

Bigger, badder, faster…

Oracle Cloud Ecosystem

Pluggable Database Architecture

With PDB, you can develop a plug and play database. Many cool applications for this one.

To end out the day, I went to the 9th annual Oracle ACE dinner hosted by Oracle at the St Francis Yacht Club. Great food, drinks, and networking was had by all. Then back to the hotel to write this blog post.

Now off to bed so I can swim the bay with some other crazy people tomorrow morning. Wish me luck. Brrr.

Later.

Kent

Posted in ODTUG, Oracle, User Groups and tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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