The Irish DBA

Data Modeling Jobs

Gord Irish — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 03:12:30 +0000

Last week at IRMAC, I heard Karen Lopez talking about the severe shortage of experienced data modelers. Sadly, I drifted out of the field about 10 years ago when the jobs dried up. When I used ERwin, it was still owned by Logicworks. I still have a Logicworks shirt from one of their user conferences

So, if had stuck with it and been gainfully unemployed as a data modeler the last 10 years, would I be in big demand now?

#UWMath Reunion 2011

Gord Irish — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 04:40:12 +0000

Saturday I attended the 2011 UWaterloo Math reunion, partly to take the tour that I missed on my 2009 25th anniversary reunion. On this tour I got to see the brand new Math 3 building that just opened. It has that stark minimalist look of many new public buildings where the budget is very tight but it does have a lot of natural light which makes it a pleasant place.

Other things I discovered on the tour:

They still have computer labs, I would have thought that personal laptops would make labs obsolete but there are lots of labs still and still open 24×7 as far as I could tell.

MathSOC is still there in the same place. The CSC is still there too. Hopefully the CSC couch is NOT still there, the office wasn’t open. Watsfic is gone though, perhaps moved somewhere else.

The Math 3rd floor lounge is now the “Comfy” and the new funiture certainly is comfy, you could easily sleep in one of those chairs. The C+D is still there too of course

The Red Room is long gone, can’t even tell where it was. But MFCF is still there, though instead of a Honeywell and a VAX there is a bunch of high end SGI and Sun (Oracle) servers.

They still hand in assignments on paper into that big mailbox with the slots. It looks like the same one that was there 25+ yuears ago. Unbelieveable, I thought they would use email and something like PDFs long ago.

And I forgot to look for the study table donated by our 25th anniversay reunion. The students do love the study tables setup around the Math building now.The have power and network connections and many were in use even on a Saturday afternoon.

CDMP Data Governance beta exam #datagovernance

Gord Irish — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 03:14:46 +0000

I wrote the DAMA CDMP Data Governance beta exam recently. I scored 68%, which actually surprised me. Due to time constraints I only studied the data governance chapter of the DMBOK and attended the June MDM+DG conference in Toronto as study materials. That may have been good timing because there were some questions I recognized from material covered at the conference. There were also some questions that I didn’t understand what was being asked, which probably shows that I should have used a broader set of study materials.

This exam has a different feel from the other CDP exams, less technical, more shades of gray perhaps. I would characterize it as picking the most correct answer rather than just picking correct answer as on the more technical exams. I put that to the nature of data governance being more political than the other more technical areas. It was an interesting exam to write because of that.

I already have my CDMP so I didn’t really need to write it but beta exams are free and DAMA needs beta testers to validate the exam. If the beta is still open, I encourage anyone interested in data governance to give it a try. It helps DAMA get the exam validated and helps you to “know what you know”. It is also an interesting set of questions to work with.

RIM, ironically

Gord Irish — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 14:05:29 +0000

Lots of bad news about RIM these days. Layoffs, their blackberry products cannot compete with iPhones and Androids etc. Ironically, at work I just received an upgrade to a BB Bold 9780 and it’s the first BB that I really like. It is small, simple, easy to use, nice screen and has great battery life. I’d consider buying one for myself.

I don’t use handhelds for graphical things, the screen is too small even on an Android or iPhone and I hate those virtual keyboards. For text, primarily email and twitter, the BB works great. With all these poor sales, I ought to be able to find a good deal too right?

Trying out Chrome

Gord Irish — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 03:03:14 +0000

Trying out Google Chrome, having been a dedicated Firefox user for years. So far, everything works much the same and it is vastly faster. I now wonder how Firefox manages to be so slow.

I don’t see a downside to Chorme yet, except maybe wasting too much time playing Angry Birds. Being a Gmail, Greader, Gmaps and Google search user I suppose Chrome should work better but I never really had any issues with Firefox there anyway.

Goodbye Firefox? Hate to give up on it but speed is good, slow is not.

Oracle SQL Data Modeler 3.0 #oracle #datamodel

Gord Irish — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 04:10:34 +0000

Oracle has made SQL Data Modeler free again with release 3.0. But how good is it? Sometimes free is good but free doesn’t always equate to a bargain. Is it a useful tool or just better than nothing, or maybe even worse than nothing?

It has been several years since I have had one of the big data modeling tools like ERwin or ER/Studio so it hard for me to compare.

One advantage I can see is that it can be widely deployed and avoid the ERwin ghetto where only one person has access to the data models because there is only one ERwin license. And perhaps, it might also encourage some companies to have data models at all since they perceive tools like ERwin as “too expensive”. It is also integrated into SQL Developer which most Oracle users would be using anyway so it is handy.

After a quick look it seems to cover all the basics, forward / reverse engineer, schema compare, etc. The overall feel though is very clunky like typing with gloves on. For a small schema it’s okay but get any significant number of tables in there and navigation is difficult, it is difficult to even get a sense of what the model looks like. To me, it is a tool for a small shop or a small project. For a big enterprise project, you probably still need to spend the big bucks for an enterprise tool. But it’s still nice to have SQL Data Modeler around for small cases. I use SQL Developer all the time so it is right there too.

Testing post by email

Gord Irish — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 21:18:51 +0000

Just testing a WordPress post be email

Netbeans, Oracle and Rails #oracle #rubyonrails

Gord Irish — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 05:40:34 +0000

For this Oracle and Rails project I decided to use the Netbeans IDE. Usually I just use vi for Rails but it just seemed right to try Oracle’s IDE for an Oracle project. With the Netbeans team dropping Ruby and Rails support I thought I might be the last user but the cavalry has rushed in and saved the day. There must be a bunch of users out there.

Rails is pretty terse so I don’t see a big productivity gain from using a big IDE but it does work well enough, formats the code nicely and keeps all the files organized.

It still feels a bit weird to call Netbeans an Oracle product, and just about as weird to download it from an Oracle website.

The Oracle DBA and Ruby on Rails #oracle #dba #rubyonrails

Gord Irish — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 04:32:35 +0000

Over time, most Oracle DBAs build up a library of scripts for day to day tasks. In the old days, when we had maybe 5 databases to manage, we used sqlplus and some shell scripting and we had our library of sql and plsql scripts to run individually on each database with shell scripting.

Now I have about 40 databases to manage and it just doesn’t scale. The idea of logging in 40 times to execute the same script isn’t appealing and then there is the problem of aggregating all the output.

I need a scripting environment that can handle multiple connections. There are several good scripting languages but I use Ruby because I like the syntax, it has excellent connection handling, and and straightforward access to the Win32 API. It’s easy to run some SQL across 40 databases and aggregate the output into Excel.

Ruby also has Rails. Dealing with a lot of databases requires metadata.The most obvious place to store metadata about databases is a database and Rails give me a data model and an app for little effort. I can use the migrations to easily manage the metadata and port it around as needed too.

That said, I’ve always been fascinated by the Lisp family of languages, I might try using Clojure some day.

And a note to Bryn Llewellyn at Oracle. If you would give me PLSQL that could run connection-less in the client, I would use that for some cases. Obviously it would only support anonymous PLSQL blocks but I could live with that. Nothing works better with Oracle than PLSQL but it is limited to a connection, and that won’t do anymore.

Gave up on #ubuntu on my laptop

Gord Irish — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 04:25:53 +0000

I had to give up on Ubuntu on my Win7 laptop. It was a Wubi install and lately grub is broken on Wubi. I know a native partition install is better then Wubi but HP builds these laptops with no free partitions and until the warranty is up I’m not messing with it. I fixed grub once but broke again on the next update. It’s too fiddly to keep fixing it so I just give up for now and stick with Win7. it is slower but good enough.

Still running Lucid Lynx on one of my desktops and it’s still my fav.