The Data Warrior

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Archive for the category “ODTUG”

23 Dec 2012
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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 , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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
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
29 Jul 2012

Big Blunder means extended discount opportunity for Data Vault fans

Sometimes the best laid plans…they just don’t quite work out. Here’s what I mean:

If you were at my Data Vault session at the recent ODTUG KScope conference in San Antonio, you got a special code to enter at http://www.LearnDataVault.com/kscope12  to get $200 off the new online Data Vault Implementation training class. (For more on the training check out this post).

That deal was supposed to end this week on July 31st.

Well…

I was just informed that there was an error in the code on the BUY button.

Error in the code? Say it isn’t so! (Hey – I did not do the programming)

If you went to the link and put in the code you got some sort of an error message. If you forgot the code and just pushed the button you went to Dan’s offer to try the first module for only $7.00 (USD) – which is a really great deal on its own.

As you may imagine, I was not happy to hear that the Kscope participants were unable to get the discount I promised them and that there are only a few days left for this deal. 😦

So as compensation for this mistake, I was able to negotiate an extension of this offer until August 30th.

So that means you now have until August 30th to take advantage of the $200 discount.

Just go to http://www.LearnDataVault.com/kscope12 and put in the secret code. All the details about the course are there on the page for you to review.

And don’t forget, Dan offers a 7 day, 100% money back guarantee.

So if you have been putting off investing in this course, you just got a 30 day reprieve to get the $200 discount.

Don’t waste it. There are not that many 2nd chances.

Kent

P.S., Since speakers at KScope do not get attendee lists and emails, I have no way to directly contact the folks who attended my session. So do me a favor, help me get the word out. Please re-post and tweet this to your networks so we can be sure no one misses out. Thanks a bunch.

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