The Data Warrior

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Archive for the category “SQL Developer Data Modeler”

05 Feb 2013

Rocky Mountain High and Some Chi Gung

Are you ready?

Are you coming?

The annual Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group Training Days kicks off next Monday, February 11 at the Denver Convention Center. I can hardly wait! I love the beautiful surroundings and vibe of Denver and the mountains. It is a great place to hang out, relax, and sharpen your skills.

I will be there attending sessions, networking with some old friends, and doing three presentations. Here they are:

Five Ways to Make Data Modeling Fun Tuesday, 11:15 – 12:15

Using OBIEE and Data Vault to Virtualize Your BI Environment: An Agile Approach Tuesday, 5:15 – 6:15 PM

Top 10 Cool Features in Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler Wednesday 2:45 – 3:45 PM

In addition to these officially scheduled sessions, I will be conducting  Morning Chi Gung sessions at 7 Am both Tuesday and Wednesday morning for those interested. Not sure yet where we will gather for this but probably in the Convention Center somewhere. (Keep an eye on my twitter stream @KentGraziano for details once I am on site next Monday).

The Chi Gung sessions are staring to be a traditon with me at various Oracle user events, so please come and join our growing tribe. If you are not sure what Chi Gung is, check out my post from last summer for a video introduction. For those of us coming from lower altitude, these morning sessions should help us adjust a little easier. Since the air is a bit thinner in Denver, learning to breathe deeply will be a useful skill. 🙂

If you are signed up and planning to attend, I look forward to meeting up with you. If not, get signed up soon and get yourself to Denver to enjoy a little Rocky Mountain high with 1,000 of the brightest Oracle minds in the world.

See ya!

Kent

 

Posted in Chi Gung, Data Modeling, Data Vault, Oracle, SQL Developer Data Modeler, User Groups and tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment
23 Dec 2012
3 Comments

2012: Year in the Life of an Oracle Data Warrior

Hard to believe it is nearly the end of the year. But…it is here.

I will be taking time until the end of the year so I am doing my “year-end” post now.

It was a significant year for me with many new things, events, conferences, and clients. Here is a list, by month of a few of them:

January

I launched this blog – Oracle Data Warrior! At the stroke of midnight on January 1, I hit publish for this posting. So far I have had over 22,000 views on the site with the best/biggest day drawing 294 views on September 24th. People came to check out a free promotion for my new Kindle book.

So far 78 of you have subscribed to this blog and hence get notification whenever I post something new.

Thanks for your support! (For the rest – subscribed now so you don’t miss anything in 2013).

In January I also launched the Year of the Data Vault by going to Dan Linstedt’s Data Vault certification class in Montreal. It was a great class. Check the January archive for my posts about the class.

February

I posted what has turned out to be THE most popular article so far: The best FREE data modeling tool ever. So far it has had 8,213 views! Wow! (of course since a bunch of you just clicked the link that number has gone up again)

Also big in February (every year) is the RMOUG Training Days in Denver, Colorado. This year I did the first ever remote presentation via skype as part of their pre-conference seminar on data warehousing. My presentation was, of course, on Data Vault. There were a few technical issues but with the help of my good friend Jerry Ireland we got through it fine.

(Note: For RMOUG 2013, I will actually be presenting in person).

March

Two really big things this month:

  1. I filed with the state of Texas and formed Data Warrior LLC, signed my very first 1099 (independent) contract and became an official business.
  2. The Data Vault Training Portal was launched. You can read my post about that here.

April

Business wise, I started the 1099 contract work at MD Anderson Cancer Center and got to work building a data vault for one of their internal projects.

On the blog, I made some modification to the layout and added a War Chest page with links to some resources that cost a little money (as opposed to my White Paper page which has Free stuff).

May

After one month of being an independent contractor I bought my first smartphone – an LG Nitro. I am not really a huge gadget guy so I had put this off for sometime but finally gave in so I could tweet at the upcoming ODTUG conference in San Antonio.

Of course this means I signed up for Twitter. You can find me there at https://twitter.com/KentGraziano.

June

June was  HUGE month.

  1. The Data Vault modeling book, hit #1 on Kindle.
  2. I got “promoted” to Oracle ACE Director (and found out via a Facebook post!).
  3. And of course there was KScope12 in San Antonio, Texas. I taught Chi Gung every morning at 7 AM and blogged about the event every night (at about midnight). Just check my June archives for all the posts and plenty of pictures.

July

Slowed down a bit here. Recovered from KScope12 (started planning for KScope13). Wrote a bit about work/life balance and posted this cool InfoGraphic.

August

Another first for me in August was I published my first eBook on Kindle about data model design reviews.

Then we had an excellent family vacation with my father back east. We drove through the Adirondack Mountains in New York State and then to the Green Mountains of Vermont where we stayed at the Trapp Family Lodge. It gets my highest recommendation for a family friendly, environmentally aware, upscale, outdoor vacation resort. Pay the money and go – you only live once!

While on the trip, my nine year old son came up with a great idea for a blog post: How to make data modeling fun. When we got back, I wrote and posted it here. (Soon it will be a presentation at a conference near you)

September

This was another big and fun month – all about Oracle Open World 2012 and getting to attend my first Oracle ACE Director meeting at Oracle HQ. Like at KScope, I blogged every night in the wee hours to capture what I saw and learned that day. The smart phone got a lot of use taking pictures in session and around San Francisco. It is all logged in the September archives.

October

Actually OOW 2012 bled over into October so there are even more posts and pictures in the October Archive folder.

The other biggie in October was that I finished out my contract at MD Anderson Cancer Center and started a new gig at McKesson Specialty Health (US Oncology). This has turned out to be a great project with a good team (like I had at MD Anderson), but with the added benefit of only being 9 miles from my house. This is the shortest commute I have had since college! Saves me 2.5 hours a day in driving.

Needless to say, that is a very nice aspect of the job.

November

This month was less about data (and my normal work) and more about fitness, a new habit, and being a warrior. (Though I did get accepted to present at the RMOUG Training Days in Denver.)

The highlight of the month was attending the 20th Anniversary celebration for the International Combat Hapkido Federation. I have been attending their workshops and seminars for over 15 of those years and have had the privilege to train with several of their master as well as their founder and grand master John Pellegrini. Combat Hapkido is a very practical martial art for self-defense and a lot of fun to learn and practice.

It was a great event with back to back workshops (i.e., work outs!) with many masters and grand masters. We got training in Tai Chi, stretching, conditioning, kicking, Filipino Escrima, ground survival, and pressure points. There were actual martial arts celebs in attendance including Bill “Superfoot” Wallace, Cynthia Rothrock, and Stephen Hayes.

Since my main art is Tae Kwon Do, I was very privileged to meet and train with Grandmaster Bill Wallace (who actually has signed my last two black belt certificates along with GM Pellegrini). GM Wallace’s session was challenging and fun. He is quite entertaining.

Me (right) with GM Superfoot Wallace (center) and Master Ramon Voils

Me (right) with GM Superfoot Wallace (center) and Master Ramon Voils

At 67 years old, GM Wallace can kick faster and higher than pretty much everyone I have every trained with. I can only hope to be doing so well when I reach that age.

This why he is called "Superfoot"

This is why he is called “Superfoot”

For more pictures from the event, you can subscribe to my newsfeed on Facebook or like my page. You might even find a picture of me in a suit!

December

And now we are up to this final month of 2012. I have been very busy with my work at McKesson so have only got one post out about the newest release of SQL Developer Data Modeler (which I use nearly every day!).

I did however recently get notification that I had several papers accepted for presentation at the ODTUG  KScope13 conference in New Orleans next June. Be sure to register for that event too!

Yes it was quite the busy year…

Stay tuned for 2013 and see what happens.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Kent

The Oracle Data Warrior

Posted in Chi Gung, Data Modeling, Data Vault, Data Warehouse, Fitness, ODTUG, Oracle, Self Defense, SQL Developer Data Modeler, User Groups and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
02 Dec 2012
3 Comments

Have you lost your keys?

Has this ever happened to you:

You are starting a new project working on an existing database or data warehouse.

Being the great data architect that you are, you of course ask to see the data model.

The response: Data model? What data model?

Or maybe: Why do you need to see that?

Sigh.

So you fight your way through getting access to a copy of the database, get connected, then reverse engineer the database (see here for a presentation on doing that with SQL Developer Data Modeler).

And voila!

A useless diagram of tables with no foreign keys!

Seriously?

So what gives? How can there be no keys in an Oracle database?

You ask, and get the usual answer – “it’s all in the code.”

Great. Like you want to read all the <enter language du jour here> code that some programmers wrote years ago.

So what’s a data architect to do?

Simple – if you are using  SQL developer Data Modeler, that is.

Early on in version 3.x, our friends at Oracle added this really cool utility – Discover Foreign Keys, to help is just this circumstance.

To find this tool you need to right mouse of the name of a relational model in the Browser tab.

Discover FKs

Discover FKs

Once you select the option, it just runs and adds in any foreign keys it can find. Now when you look at your diagram it will show you new FK lines where there weren’t any before.

I finally got a chance to try this out recently and it worked great,

The model I was looking into had no FKs at all, but did have Primary Keys defined on most of the tables. (The story is that the FKs were not used because it would slow down loading the data).

And apparently, all the FK columns were named the same as the PK columns. Nice.

Not sure how it works in other scenarios, but in this case it works as advertised.

Give it try next time you get one of “those” databases.

UPDATE 03-Dec-2012: I was thinking it would be good if you could tell after the fact that an FK was generated rather than actually in the database. I just found the property for that. If you double click on the FK line then look under Dynamic Properties you will see “createdByFKDiscoverer” set to “true”.  Not the most obvious place to look (I was thinking in the comment might be nice), but at least it is there somewhere. So you might want to build a custom report to find them in the future.

Later.

Kent

P.S. A lot has happened since my last post. This biggest thing is that I got two presentations accepted for the RMOUG 2013 Training Days in Denver next February. It is one of the best user group events in the country. Check it out now for early registration.

Posted in Data Modeling, Oracle, SQL Developer Data Modeler, User Groups and tagged , ,
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 , , , , ,
28 Jun 2012
2 Comments

ODTUG KScope: Day 5 – Happy Trails

Well the final day of KScope12 finally arrived and it was another hot one with the final sessions and the Texas heat. Another bright red sunrise greeted us as it has all week.

image

Today I managed to get a picture of the group that showed up for Chi Gung every day at 7 AM. We even had some new people today (officially the last day). They all enjoyed the sessions and learned (hopefully) enough to practice a bit once they return home.

I am grateful to all the participants for showing up early each morning with enthusiasm and a willingness to try something new. It made my job to lead them much easier. (There will be a You Tube video sometime next week for people to review, so stay tuned)

The first order of business for the day (after Chi Gung) was the official KScope closing session. Even though there were still two sessions to go afterward we had the closing at 9:45 AM. We were entertained, yet again, with some photo and video footage taken throughout the week, including one interview with me! We also learned who got the presenter awards for each track and for the entire event.

Then we all got beads to remind us to go to KScope13 in New Orleans.

Next was my final session for the event: Reverse Engineering (and Re-Engineering) an Existing Database with Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler.

I had a surprising number of people for the last day after the closing session. I think there was about 70 people wanting to learn more about SDDM. Apparently most people are unaware of the features of the tool (which I have written about on several posts).

So, that was nice.

Finally I went to JP Dicjks talk about Big Data and Predicting the Future.

His basic premise is that we should now never throw away any data as it all can be used to extend the depth of analytics. We can react to events in real time and proactively change outcomes of those events.

The diagram above shows the basics of one way that data moves through the world and into the Hadoop file systems. I am oversimplifying but it is a cool diagram.

Part of the challenge is uncovering un-modeled data. I guess that is where the recent Oracle acquisition, Endeca, comes in with their Data Discovery tool (again oversimplifying) .

And that was pretty much it for the show. It was a great week with lots of learning and networking (and tweeting). We all had a good time and learned enough to make our heads explode.

I look forward to meeting folks again next year at KScope13 in New Orleans.

Kent

Posted in Chi Gung, Data Warehouse, ODTUG, Oracle, SQL Developer Data Modeler and tagged , , , , , , , ,

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