Chicago Oracle User's Group this Monday!

Anyone in the the Chicago area should not forget the Chicago Oracle user's Group! My colleague Dan Norris will be speaking on Oracle Adaptive Access Manager and security in general. This will take place this coming Monday in Chicago (where else??) Check it out here! link

Data integration is not necessarily creating you a Data Warehouse

Nice quick read, but older article! link

Oracle Warehouse Builder OWB vs. Oracle Data Integrator ODI

Here's a snippet from a bigger article written by Mark Rittman over on OTN.

Oracle Data Integrator in Relation to Oracle Warehouse Builder

At this point, regular users of Oracle Warehouse Builder are probably wondering how Oracle Data Integrator relates to it and how it fits into the rest of the Oracle data warehousing technology stack. The answer is that Oracle Data Integrator is a tool that’s complementary to Oracle Warehouse Builder and can be particularly useful when the work involved in creating the staging and integration layers in your Oracle data warehouse is nontrivial or involves SOA or non-Oracle database sources.

For those who are building an Oracle data warehouse, Oracle Warehouse Builder has a strong set of Oracle-specific data warehousing features such as support for modeling of relational and multidimensional data structures, integration with Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer, support for loading slowly changing dimensions, and a data profiler for understanding the structure and semantics of your data.

Where Oracle Data Integrator provides value is in the initial preparation and integration of your source data, up until the staging area of the data warehouse.

Oracle Data Integrator can integrate and synthesize data from numerous disparate datasources, including Web services and event-based architectures, and, as shown in the figure above, provides a handy graphical interface on top of Oracle Database-specific features such as Oracle Change Data Capture. Once data has been integrated and copied into your data warehouse staging area, Oracle Warehouse Builder can take over and create and populate your operational data store and dimensional warehouse layers.

Going back to Cali, San Francisco that is!

So I've been in discussions with my girlfriend to take a trip back to San Francisco. I used to live in the city of SF for quite a while while attending UC Berkeley (among my other schools I attended) and killing my brain. I lived right at 737 Post Street near downtown. Anywho, I've made it back out there for less pleasurable reasons since then, but this time should be fun.

We're shooting for the first week in October which is perfect since it is right after Oracle Open World. You do NOT want to be in SF during that week...everything rises in prices. (unless you have to attend the conference, which then you have no choice.) Trust me, living in that city for quite awhile you start to become accustomed to when prices at hotels and even restaurants RISE due to conventions or tourism season. Many people even *think* they are getting discounts when they book hotels in advance as an Oracle speaker at Open World...lol. Again, live there for a few years and you'll share in the laugh.

This works out great since I am going to visit quite a few of my friends that work at Oracle HQ, among other big 'ol tech companies in the valley. (google THIS!) We're hopefully going to meet my family that lives East Bay around Livermore area. Then there's a few more friends in Palo Alto and Sunnyvale and Daly City that I went to school with. Hopefully we'll get to swing by the Berkeley campus to see if there is anyone I know still there. Man that Soda Hall on campus was burned in my head. We'll spend a few days in SF as well. My girlfriend has NEVER been to the bay area at all so I will have to show her all I know. She really wants to get up to Napa because she likes wine. Unfortunately since I was studying and killing my brain most of my time out here, I didn't make it up to Napa much.

So all of this isn't in the books yet, but HIGHLY likely. So my friends that see this, lets plan on meeting up!

Do certifications always prove you're qualified to do the job?

Recently, I have come to the understanding that many certs fail to really certify whether or not someone can truly master material and do an effective job. There are quite a few individuals who are just very good test takers or students, if you will, and they study very hard or take expensive 'crash-courses' to help them pass with a high score.

There are a very few amount of certifications that I believe don't fail however. I can honestly say I have NEVER met someone that became an 'Oracle Master' that really wasn't at least a 7/10 on a 10-point scale. (Most DBAs being 3, 4 or 5.) Someone like Tom Kite or Kevin Loney being around the 10 range. This certification, of course, requires you to take hands on labs that are very difficult and stressful, along with prerequisite certifications and courses.

On the other hand, a very popular certification that seems to garner a lot of attention is PMI's PMP cert. This is for project management. Unfortunately, employers drool over this certification. PMI tried to do an extensive job of screening out people that are even allowed to TAKE the exams by having you fill out how much management work you've done, references, companies, and the whole 10 yards. Unfortunately, employers seem to feel that this means PMI has cleared this person as a top proj manager, and they don't have to have their own proven, top level project managers interview them on their PM skills and abilities.

Because of this, you have people that have 'hacked' their way through the PMI process unfairly by barely qualifying or by manipulating the system, then they take expensive crash courses, and they pass with a high score- BUT they have never truly managed a highly stressful and big-money project! They sometimes even ignore the holy trinity of constraints- resources, time, and project scope!

Does this mean a cert like the PMP is junk? Absolutely not. But it needs to be taken cautiously, and not frivolously. Interview these PMP's with your own proven top-level PMPs and see if they really can pull their weight. If you have a PMP with 20 years experience, vs one with 8-10...well, you can do the math.

Do your homework ahead of time, and make sure the PMP you're hiring is proven- and not just from the references THEY give you! Putting an PMP in charge of a project that could jeapordize the project is very dangerous, and you sadly don't realize this until the project is hitting it's critical points!

SQL Developer and the TNS Connection Type Selection

I will be exploring this much further soon, but suffice it to say, sometimes when you install SQL Developer or other Oracle tools, they look at the most recent Oracle home from a new Product install. For example, I installed OWB, and it had a new home. This actually overwrote some of the paths in the Operating System, and defaulted that home as the 'main' home.

Well a tool like SQL Developer loads a nice TNSNAMES.ora listing of all your database connections and it searches through that default home. If it looks at a new home that doesn't have those listings, you drop down will have no available connections!

A VERY easy way to fix this is to launch the universal installer, look at all installed products, and while looking at the oracle homes on your box, you can use the up and down arrows on the right panel to 'rank' or put a certain oracle home as the 'main' or default home. Doing this, I then put my original database home as the default. I restarted SQL Developer, and bingo! It then read the right oracle home and the right TNSNAMES.ora entry and populated the drop down.

Not bad!

Oracle Warehouse Builder OWB 10gR2 Tutorial for you!

Here's a set of slides with some basics of OWB for beginners to look over. I know Oracle has some Oracle By Example tutorials that are 'OK' at best. This is another look at the tool for you to learn from. Hopefully these will fill in some gaps as the documentation is not so great, there are no OWB books, and there is not as much useful information about this product compared to other Oracle products.