Category: Experiences (page 1 of 1)

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October 1, 2026 / 0 Comments

What to Bring to a Professional Conference

After graduating from college and starting an office job, you will likely find yourself invited by your company, or allowed by them to attend, professional conferences. These could be giant, multi-thousand-person technical conferences, or smaller local conferences focused on general personal and professional development. Each conference will require you to bring a slightly different set of items with you to be prepared. Today, I want to cover what you should bring to a general professional conference, one that is more like the second type I described above: focused on general professional development (like communication or courage) and personal development. This is going to be a very practicle, tangible list of things to bring, not a fluffy “you should bring a good atttitude!” type of post.

My inspiration for writing this is attending the Boise Andrus Center Women & Leadership conference at Boise State University for the third year in a row. For this type of conference, I pack far fewer things than I would for a highly technical conference like FabCon/SQLCon. But if you’re new to the professional world and about to attend this type of conference for the first time, how are you supposed to know what to bring? Should you show up with just your purse (or wallet/phone) and nothing else? Is it valuable to bring other things with you? Keep reading to find out.

What’s in this post

Notebook and Pen

This one should be fairly obvious, but at this year’s conference, I’ve seen quite a few people caught without writing implements when we were requested to write things down for a session activity. I know so many people have gone totally digital and like to take notes electronically, either on a phone or laptop, but you should stick to the classics for conferences, in my opinion.

If you’re trying to take notes on a device, it’s likely harder and less convenient to do for quick activities, and it also leaves you prone to distraction. One of my rules for conferences of any kind is that I will not bring my work laptop with me, because if I do, I will definitely be pulled back into work and ignore the conference since Teams and Outlook will always be pinging. Do yourself a favor, give yourself the distraction-free option of taking notes with paper and pen. Bring yourself a notebook and pen.

Phone and Charger

The one device I do bring with me to use during the conference is my phone (well, I bring two since I have separate work and personal phones). Having your phone with you will allow you to access any digital information provided by the conference, such as parking instructions, directions for where to go, what to bring, as well as giving you the ability to scan QR codes from presenters throughout the conference. In almost every session of every conference I’ve attended, the presenter has had a QR code in their presentation for feedback sites or free items from them. They may also provide resources to use for worksheets or tasks during the presentation. You don’t want to miss out on those opportunities if you think you might like to take them.

Of course, you can’t forget something to charge your phone in case you use it a lot, so bring a charger with you. For bigger conferences, I recommend bringing a power bank instead of relying on being able to find out outlet, since they can be a hot commodity. For smaller conferences like the Women & Leadership conference at BSU, you can bring your normal charger and expect to find an available outlet when needed.

Water Bottle

Many conferences are moving to be more environmentally friendly (yay!) so they do not provide to go cups or single-use water bottles for attendees, which makes bringing your own refillable water bottle a great idea. This holds especially true at the Women & Leadership Conference at BSU, because the Andrus Center that runs the conference focuses on environmental stewardship. That means that all drink-ware is glass and fairly small, so I’ve seen people having to walk back and forth to the main room constantly to get water and coffee that’s provided, and all are trying very hard not to spill from the small glasses while walking.

I totally support the move to not having disposable drinkware, but it does make me glad that I bring my own water bottle, so am not beholden to the water dispensers and small glasses in the main room.

On the note of coffee, the same thing applies as with water. You may want to bring your own travel mug for getting the free conference coffee if you don’t want to be stuck with a very small glass that’s not easily transportable to other areas.

Snacks and Gum

Conference days can be long and rigid, and they may not align with your natural cues for hunger or your regular meal times, so I recommend bringing a small snack (or several) with you to any conference so you know you won’t go hungry and get hangry if lunch or snacks aren’t served when you need them. I always bring a granola/nut bar of some kind with me, and then maybe some fruit leather or whatever else I have in my pantry.

I’m the type of person that needs to eat a little bit of food every couple hours, so I won’t (mentally) survive if I had to go the five hours between breakfast before the conference and lunch at the conference with nothing to hold me over. Plus, there’s never a guarantee that you will like what is served at the conference (they’re always so hit or miss with the food), so carrying your own backup snack is a good idea in that instance, too.

Some conferences serve treats or snacks in the afternoons, but not all do. Which is just another reason to prepare yourself, so you don’t spend the whole afternoon with your stomach growling.

A final note on this topic is that you may also want to consider bringing gum or mints for yourself, since you’re more likely to talk to others at a conference than in other places, because part of every conference is networking. And with all the free coffee served, and the snacks to hold you over between meals, you might want to have a method to freshen your breath before talking to a bunch of people.

Jacket/Cardigan

This one goes out to all the ladies, who, like me, are plagued by too-strong air conditioning everywhere we go. Conference centers are usually set up to keep the rooms cool with hundreds of bodies heating the place up, which means that the cool air is likely flowing strongly, even in the cooler months of the year. I personally have found that conferences are always too hot or too cold, so I bring a jacket or cardigan with me every day of a conference. It’s a little annoying to pack around sometimes, but when I get stuck in a room where the air conditioning is blowing directly on me for an hour or more, I appreciate being able to cover up and prevent (figurative) frostbite.

If you know you’re on the opposite end of the spectrum and are always running hot, this advice may not apply to you. But it never hurts to come prepared. If you run hot, this cute little phone-powered fan may be a good idea to bring instead. These were given out as goodies on the first day of the Women & Leadership conference at BSU this year, and I think it’s pretty nifty. It blows a lot stronger than I would have guessed, and some of my older coworkers told me it was great for dealing with hot flashes throughout the conference. I don’t know how quickly it would drain your battery, but it does seem a lot handier than bringing a separate battery powered fan.

Picture showing a smart phone with mini fan plugged into the charging port

Laptop

While I did say above that you should try not to use your laptop for notes since you may get distracted by normal work and miss the conference even though you’re at the conference, I think there are some reasons that bringing your laptop may be a good idea. Personally, I bring my own, non-work laptop with me to conferences in case I want to research anything in breaks or to be able to work on my blog or other personal projects. If you have a job that just won’t let you be “off” for a whole day, you might bring your work laptop with you to check in at lunch or during breaks.

I am currently writing this post on my laptop while waiting for the second day of my conference to start. Laptops aren’t bad by default, but can become an impediment to your learning and growth if you let it.

If you are going to bring your laptop, make sure it’s charged before you leave for the conference to reduce the chances of needing to charge throughout the day. But also remember to bring your charger to use when needed, just don’t expect to find an easy and convenient place to plug it in and be able to use it. Technical conferences are usually pretty good at putting power strips everywhere in session rooms since computers are expected in those conferences, but non-technical conferences are a lot less likely to give you good places to charge and work at the same time.

Earbuds/Headphones

This recommendation is for people who are easily overwhelmed by crowds and large events, or people who just want to be in their own bubble for a bit throughout the day. I always bring earbuds to conferences with me, in case I want to watch a video over lunch, or if I need a moment of solitude and relative quiet in a loud event. Plus, having the earbuds available and ready means I can quickly turn on a grounding meditation during a break if needed. I also use mine during breaks if I need to do a bit of work, since having my own quiet music on lets me concentrate better than if I was hearing all the people talking around me.

Emergency Toiletries

This recommendation is mostly directed at the ladies again, but truly can apply to anyone. I normally carry around a small pouch with my regularly needed toiletries, and going to a conference is no different. In my pouch, I have:

  • Ibuprofen, Tylenol, and Benedryl (headaches and allergy flare ups)
  • Floss (for post-lunch freshening)
  • Earplugs (mostly for when I am traveling, to make sure I can block out traffic noises in hotels, but also handy for other things that come up)
  • Nail file
  • Nail clippers (I really hate having hang nails and chipped nails)
  • Pocket mirror (good for checking face/teeth after eating)
  • Lip balm
  • Hand sanitizer
  • Glasses lens cleaning wipes

Customize the list to be whatever you would most likely need in a mini personal “emergency” situation (fashion issue, minor medical issue).

Summary

Preparing for a professional conference should be quick and easy, especially if you follow my list of items above. Don’t bring too many things, because then it becomes hard to move between sessions and to shake the hands of new people you meet. Try to fit everything into a single backpack or bag you can easily handle yourself, something you can tuck to the side or under your chair during a session.

If you would like to know what to expect and how to mentally prepare for a professional but non-technical conference, I will have a post coming out next week that covers that topic. I have a younger colleague who joined me for the Women & Leadership conference this week, and I don’t think she knew what to expect for how this conference would go, and I believe it impacted what she thinks of the conference. Attending a generalized, non-technical conference can feel a little weird for highly technical people like programmers and engineers, so next week’s post aims to level set expectations for these types of conferences so hopefully people aren’t surprised in a bad way.

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August 12, 2025 / 0 Comments

TechCon365 Day 2 Recap

Today at TechCon365 in Atlanta, I did another full day session of the pre-con, this time covering everything in the realm of Microsoft Fabric. Before today, I knew hardly anything about Fabric, aside from it being something that Microsoft was pushing our team to use for a new project I wasn’t involved with. The workshop, which didn’t have any hands-on work but was still good, was led by John White and Jason Himmelstein. The two speakers did an excellent job at teaching all aspects of Fabric without being boring. This was the introduction to Fabric as a concept that I’ve been needing for months.

Note: The content below is not guaranteed to be accurate, it’s just what I took away from the workshop. In the coming months, I will be learning more about these tools myself to fact check everything and see if the new tools will work for my team.

What’s in this post

Goodbye Synapse

For me, the biggest takeaway of things I learned during today’s workshop is that Microsoft intends to get their customers migrated off Synapse as the data movement platform and into Fabric and its OneLake. As of now, Synapse as a product no longer has a product manager (according to the presenters), which means that Microsoft does not intend to make any feature updates to that tool. There is still a maintenance team for the product to fix any issues that may arise and to keep it running, but there are no long term plans for it anymore.

Synapse going away is concerning to me because my company only recently migrated to Synapse off of SSIS. My fear is that if we spend a ton of time and energy converting our ETL systems into Fabric, that as soon as we get the work done, we’ll need to start anew with whatever product line Microsoft releases next, just like what we just did with SSIS to Synapse. I understand that cycles like this are everyday occurrences in the technology sector, but I also know that my boss and the executives at my company are likely not going to be happy when I tell them what I learned in today’s workshop.

If you’re in the same situation my team is in, you are totally in Synapse and maybe just wrapped up getting there so are wary to move on to the next transition to Fabric, don’t worry too much. The presenters did assure us that Synapse will be supported for a while yet, no concrete plans have been announced to retire it. Based on that, John and Jason recommended that teams stop doing any new development using Synapse and instead start to do new development in Fabric to work as real-world test cases of how useful it can be. I haven’t yet done anything like that, so the usefulness is still unknown to me personally.

Hello Fabric

Fabric is being sold as the one stop shop for all things data in the Microsoft universe, the future of all data analytics and processing. No longer is Fabric going to be Power BI 2.0; now it will serve as the location for anything you need to do with data. While the sales pitches are great, I am wary of the transition, like I said above already. I dislike when companies claim that their new tool is going to solve all your problems, because nothing is ever that great in reality. But here is what I learned today.

OneLake: Put every speck of data here

With each tenant, Microsoft gives you a single OneLake, because it should be your one data lake for your organization, just like there is only a single OneDrive for each user. No more having dozens of storage accounts to act as separate data lakes for different processes. Now you get the one and you will like it. More details I learned:

  • Parquet files: the reigning champions
  • A “Shortcut” to the source data
    • If you want to get data from a source system, like your Oracle finance database for PeopleSoft finance, you can add a “Shortcut” to the data source without having to pull the data into OneLake with a normal ETL process.
    • This concept is the most intriguing to me, and I really want to see how it plays in real life with real data and systems. Could be too good to be true.
  • Security redefined
    • They’ve developed a new way to manage security for the data that is supposed to reduce overhead. They want to have you manage security in only one place, just like you’ll be managing all your data in one place with OneLake.
    • This feature is still in preview, so remains to be seen if it works as well as Microsoft claims
  • File Explorer: An old but good way to explore your data
    • A new plugin for Windows has been created that will allow you to view your OneLake data through the Windows File Explorer, like they’re normal files. Which they are, if they’re Delta-Parquet flat files. The new feature is OneLake File Explorer.
    • You can also view your OneLake data files through Azure Storage Explorer, which is a good second option as well since my team already uses that for other purposes.

For the OneLake concept, I like that it is trying to prioritize reusing what you already have–tools, data, reporting frameworks–so that you don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel for each new data flow process you need to create. The concepts are good, so I’m eager to use them for myself after the conference.

Lakehouse

This is a new way to store data that is offered exclusively by OneLake in the Microsoft ecosystem. It combines the concepts of data lakes and data warehouses by using Delta Parquet format files. It gives you the ability for ACID compliant transactions on the data files while also still having compressed and cheap data storage like a data lake.

Data Factory

This is the part of Fabric that is replacing Synapse pipelines. In the demos during the workshop, I could see that the Dataflow Gen 2s and the data pipelines look almost exactly like what is currently available in Synapse, which is promising, because then at least I don’t need to learn a new GUI. Like with Synapse, the Dataflows are still backed by Spark engine to allow for parallel processing and high throughput. Both tools allow you to move data from point A to point B (the OneLake) for the scenarios where Shortcuts won’t work and you still need to literally move data between systems.

Fabric Native Databases

If the other new data storage types in OneLake and Fabric weren’t enough for you, there is now also going to be Fabric-native databases available for use. These will be SQL Databases (and some other database types) that you create directly in Fabric instead of creating them independently then joining them to the OneLake with a Shortcut. This change to Fabric is what they are intending to use to take Fabric from a data analytics platform to a full data platform. However, the presenters of today’s workshop did caution that they don’t recommend putting your production systems into these native databases yet, since they’re still new and not well-tested in the real world. But maybe in the near future, we truly will be doing 100% of our data integration engineering in Fabric.

Summary

With this technology, it feels like we could be at the cusp of a new big wave of change for how we operate in the data realm, so I am really interested to see how things play out in the next year or two. Using Fabric for all things data could be the next big thing like Microsoft is trying to sell, or maybe it will simply fade into being just another option in the existing sea of options for data manipulation and analytics in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Do you think Fabric is going to be the the next big thing in data technology like Microsoft claims?

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September 27, 2024 / 0 Comments

A Week in the Life- 9/23 – 9/27

Have you ever wondered what the normal work tasks of a database developer/integration engineer looks like? If you have, then this is the post for you. This is a new series of posts where I simply give an overview of what I accomplished each week, giving insight into what life as a database developer looks like for those who might be curious. I also want to do these reviews for my own records and edification, because it’s always good to keep track of the things you accomplish at your job. This post is going to review the week of September 23 – September 27, 2024.

What’s in this post

Meeting with a Software Vendor

One part of my job is interacting with various software vendors that we buy products from. I’m currently on a longer-term project where we are doing a piece-by-piece upgrades to one application that our legal department uses, so this week I met with the vendor’s development team to get an overview of the next step of this upgrade process.

One of the joys of working with vendors is sometimes you go into these meetings thinking the purpose is completely different than what it ends up being, then you have to rethink everything you planned for the meeting on the fly. That was how this meeting went. I wasn’t expecting that I would be the one taking lead on driving the topic by asking questions we needed answers to on our side before we could move forward with the next step of the upgrade. I thought the meeting was going to be the vendor giving an overview of the product for my own learning, not me driving the conversation. As someone newer to the company, this change was a little scary, but I handled it well and got good information for our team from the vendor.

Updating Security Certificates

This part of technology is something I’m still not very familiar with but had to dive into this week. My team had an ETL that broke because it could no longer communicate with our customer’s software due to an outdated security certificate. To fix this broken ETL, I had to locate the correct updated certificate and put that on our ETL server and remove the old one. After making such a small change, things were back to working as they normally do. This problem was a good learning opportunity and not nearly as difficult as I was expecting it would be.

Emergency Database Refresh

I got to experience my first emergency refresh request in our Oracle database environment this week because something went wrong with one of our production databases and the app development team wanted to refresh the database into the lowers as quickly as possible to start troubleshooting. I think fate decided we should have a good day, because our Oracle cloning process into our test environments went off without any issues and finished in about an hour, which is almost a record low. We’ve ran into numerous issues in recent months with the pluggable database cloning process in Oracle, so we are very thankful that one of those problems didn’t arise when we needed this emergency refresh.

Completing Database Permissions Requests

Another piece of Oracle work I got to experience for the first time this week was updating user permissions. We received a request from one of our application developers that they needed a service account to be granted the same level of permissions that his own account had (in test) so that he could complete a task. Although the SQL needed to complete a permissions change in Oracle looks a little different from what I’m used to in SQL Server, it overall was very similar to making permissions changes with T-SQL so was easy to complete.

Attending A Women’s Leadership Conference

My favorite part of this week was getting to spend Tuesday and Wednesday at the Women & Leadership Conference by the Andrus Center at Boise State. This was my first time attending this conference, and I was able to go with the handful of other women in the IT department.

As would be expected for this type of conference, the sessions focused on building soft skills in women instead of hard technical skills like previous work conferences I’ve attended. I listened to a range of women speakers, all of whom are in various leadership roles in different fields and states across the country. I wouldn’t say I loved every session I attended, but most of them were interesting and I learned a lot of tips for managing in the work environment as a woman that I hadn’t thought of before. In the near future, I will be writing a recap with more of my learnings from the conference, if you’re interested in hearing more.

Troubleshooting a Virtual Machine (VM)/SQL Server Connection Issue

This issue was not something I had ever considered before, because I’ve never had to think about the networking setup for VMs that I’ve worked with. Normally, someone else sets up the VM and makes sure it has all the networking and firewall rules needed before we get access to the VM. However, one of my project teammates and I found out that it’s not always the case.

I am working on a different application upgrade project from the one I mentioned above, and I was in charge of setting up those SQL Servers last week. This week, the main application developer started his portion of setting up the VMs we put the SQL Servers on, and he found that he was unable to access the SQL Server from his local computer version of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). When he messaged me about this connection issue, I had no idea where to start troubleshooting it since I had never had to think about how SSMS connects to the SQL Server on the VM before.

I had to work with our networking team to figure out the issue, which ended up being that the local firewall on the VM was not setup to allow ingress from the two ports that SSMS/SQL Server requires for connections. The networking team wrote two commands to allow that ingress, ran the commands on all 3 servers we setup last week, and then we were able to easily connect to the new SQL Server instances from our local SSMS apps instead of having to login to the VMs directly.

Finishing and Presenting a Python Data Analysis Script

One of the things I was most pleased and excited about this week was finally getting to demo a complicated Python script I wrote to optimize customer orders based on their previous order history, given a list of input parameters from the customer. I have spent months working on this script, going back and forth with the business users about what should be included, adding new features when requested, and even totally reworking the algorithm when their requests got more advanced. My demo of the script had an audience of the business users as well as members of my own team, including my manager.

The demo itself went really well, the script worked exactly as I wanted it to, running in under 5 seconds to optimize the customer data and provide a recommendation for what should be stocked to fulfill those orders, which is a massive improvement from the current process that takes a week to calculate the best possible solutions. What did not go as I expected was hearing from the business users that they are unsure if the solution provided is accurate enough, so they’re afraid to move forward with my script unless I did several things that would likely lead to several more months of rework. At the end of the meeting, we had decided as a team that instead of implementing this solution I worked hard on for months, that isntead we would put their current process onto a newer and beefier server in hopes that it would run faster than the current week.

No developer wants to spend months working on something just to be told that it won’t be used due to reasons that are out of the developer’s control, but that seems to be the situation I am in now. I am staying positive about it though, because it was a great Python development learning opportunity for me when I came into the company, and I have faith that with time, the business users will come around to using the faster and more modern solution when they see that the results I produced are very close to what they already get with the current solution. I might need to do a little more tweaking to get my algorithm’s results into an acceptable range compared to the current process, but I am hoping it won’t require a full rework to do so.

Summary

Sometimes I have weeks at work where I feel like I haven’t accomplished all that much. This week was one of those. But now that I have typed out everything I did like this, I am seeing that I do a LOT of work while I’m at work, and I am proud of everything I learned and accomplished this week, even if every single work item did not go as planned.

Being a database developer or data integration engineer comes with a lot of variation in work, which you can probably see by looking at this week’s and last week’s summaries. There is always something new to learn and work on, so I’m excited I’ve had another interesting week of work and I look forward to next week being interesting as well. (Although I’m technically on vacation next week, so really I mean the following week.)

Do you have any questions about what a database developer does day-to-day that I haven’t answered yet? Let me know in the comments below!

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September 11, 2024 / 0 Comments

Oracle Cloud World 2024- Day 2 In Review

I am going to try to keep this post shorter than yesterday’s because today was an ever longer conference day for me, and I followed it up by doing some sightseeing in Vegas for the entire evening afterwards. Overall, my sentiment of the day is that a good portion of the sessions are not what I was hoping for or needing in my Oracle journey right now.

Once again, I did learn a lot of new things, but so many of those things aren’t applicable to our Oracle systems at my current job. I think a big part of that is due to the fact that Oracle is basically a side database for us, not the main databases we are developing with the majority of the time. Many of the sessions I’ve attended in the conference so far have been targeted at developers who solely develop in the Oracle ecosystem, doing more advanced developing than anything I’ve needed to do with our Oracle databases. That’s not really a fault of the sessions, more of a mismatch of my needs and wants with the main target audience of the conference.

What’s in this post

Keynote 1: Discover the Power of Oracle AI in Oracle Fusion Applications

This was another keynote where many incredible statements were made about the influence and reach of Oracle, specifically in relation to Large Language Models (LLMs) and other aspects of Artificial Intelligence (AI). One of my to-do items for after the conference is to complete my own research to fact-check these grandiose statements that have been made throughout the conference.

The main point of this keynote was to once again talk to large customers of Oracle that are utilizing AI in there internal corporate systems or “at the edge” with their own customers. I thought a lot of the use cases presented were interesting, like how Caesar’s uses AI to speed up check-in and check-out and other customer-facing features of their resorts and casinos. I also liked many of the presented AI agents and features that Oracle has been working on, like the ability to automate a lot of the more tedious aspects of database management or day-to-day tasks of accountants and other parts of businesses to free up human time for better things.

This session is the epitome of what I wish every session at the conference would be. Although if they were all like this, I think I would be extremely overwhelmed with information. This was by far my favorite session of the day. The topic of the session was vector search and how it relates to artificial intelligence, and the presenters did a fantastic job at explaining the general technology concepts while at the same time sprinkling in a few plugs for how Oracle is doing those things and doing them better than current standards with their new services. I cannot validate whether or not Oracle’s versions of vector search and vector databases are better than their competitors, but this session was extremely informative and cleared up a lot of topics I have been unclear on when it comes to AI.

Best Practices for Oracle Integration and OCI Process Automation

This was the second best session I attended today. What I liked most about this presentation is it was 100% what I expected based on the title and abstract. They had concise, to the point slides covering exactly what you need to know to make the best of your Oracle Integration and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure systems. Plus they also had the proper presentation layout recommended by communications classes, where they first gave us a quick overview of what they were going to cover, then they covered that information, then they gave a quick summary of what they had covered. The presentation was well-organized, the presenters were funny, and the information was useful.

Keynote 2: Solving Industries’ Biggest Challenges with Applied AI

This was yet another keynote where a top leader at Oracle interviewed various customers about how they are using Oracle’s AI tools to solve their biggest problems. While hearing testimonials like these are nice, I really don’t need to hear as many of them as I’ve heard from the keynotes in the past two days. Not the worst thing ever, but I feel like picking a different conflicting session might have provided more useful information for me.

A Simple Python, Flask Application with Oracle REST APIs

This hands-on lab definitely did not go the way the presenters wanted to, which seems to happen with a good portion of lives demos. It seems like the system our lab sandboxes were built on was not built strong enough to handle the load we were putting on it, since there were over 20 people in the session. I think the content of what we were supposed to be learning was really interesting, but only one person in the class could get the system to work, so he became the unintended example for the rest of us to watch. So shoutout to that Norwegian man who had the luck of the draw getting the web app to work.

What I realized as I was reviewing the lab code was that Flask and ORDS (Oracle REST Data Services) Python code is formatted very similarly to how Azure Functions are formatted. Which makes sense since both frameworks are allowing you to easily work with REST APIs without having to do a lot of the more tedious work yourself. Thankfully the leader of the workshop, who wrote all the code (it’s not his fault the sandboxes weren’t working because it seemed to be a network or VM issue), has the entire code example saved on his public GitHub so that I can download it and play with it on my own in the near future to play around with REST APIs in the Oracle workspace.

Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) for the Oracle Database Developer

This was one of my least favorite sessions of the day simply for the fact that I was expecting a session that covered Oracle-specific CI/CD practices, but instead, the content of the presentation was mostly generalized information about CI/CD, which I’m already familiar with. At some point in the future, I am now going to need to research the standard ways people normally do CI/CD in the Oracle environment to see if there’s anything we can or should use in our own Oracle systems.

One tidbit that was mentioned during the presentation that really brought be back in time about a year was hearing that the Oracle tool SQLcl is based on Liquibase, which is a open-source database change management tool I did a proof of concept project on at my last job. If you are interested in learning more about what I learned while doing a trial with Liquibase, you can read my post about it.

Summary

Today was really difficult for me to get through, because the day felt extremely long. I think about half the sessions I attended were useful to me while the others were not as useful. I have a whole list of random topics I’ve gathered from the presentations today that I want to research further, so that is the brightest side of today at the conference. Tomorrow is the last day of the conference, and only a half day, so I am going to try to make the most of it and learn as much from my last few sessions as possible.

Have you also been at Oracle Cloud World this year or have gone in previous years? If so, I would love to hear about your experiences in the comments below.

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September 10, 2024 / 0 Comments

Oracle Cloud World 2024- Day 1 In Review

Today was my first day at Oracle Cloud World in Las Vegas, and also my first time ever at an Oracle conference, since I only recently started doing database administration with this RDBMS. As with any technology conference, the day was jam-packed with many different sessions. Although I obviously cannot convey all the information I learned at my sessions throughout the day, I will try to summarize the interesting and key points I took away from each.

What’s in this post

Keynote Session 1: “Customers Winning with the Cloud and AI”

I’m not going to lie, I went into this conference and this sessions not having a great opinion of Oracle, due to the multiple negative experiences I had with their database platform in the past few months. However, this keynote was not a useless session, because I did learn that MGM Resorts owns a huge number of properties and hotels in Las Vegas, which is interesting from a big data perspective, and that the CIA is the first customer of Oracle. There are a lot of rumors online about how Oracle came to be and how it may or may not relate to a CIA project codename, but I couldn’t find any reputable sources, so we’ll just leave it at the CIA being the first and one of the largest customers of Oracle.

Besides those interesting tidbits, this keynote mainly contained somewhat dry interviews with different large customers of Oracle talking about how they’ve utilized Oracle products to revolutionize their businesses and how they’ve started to use AI in their technology journeys. This was the beginning of discussions surrounding “AI” that continued throughout most of the sessions today. (On that topic, I’m starting to feel like the term “AI” is being watered down or misused at this conference to represent things that really shouldn’t fall under that term…)

“Accelerate Your IAM Modernization to Multi-cloud Deployments”

This session was not what I expected it was going to be, and it wasn’t the only one where that happened today. However, even though the content of this session wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, I did learn a few interesting things. The presenters gave many startling facts about the costs associated with data breaches as well as the causes of those breaches. The statistic that I found most interesting is their claim that 60% of breaches resulted from poor patch management.

I was hoping that this presentation was going to cover more of the technical details of implementing and modernizing IAM within the Oracle ecosystem, but it proved to be a general overview of what everyone should be doing instead, which was what disappointed me about it. However, it at least gave me some topics that I can do further research on by myself to learn more about IAM in Oracle, such as the Oracle Access Manager. At least if I couldn’t get the technical details I wanted, I still got some direction about what to research next.

“Create a Data Pipeline with Data Transforms in Autonomous Database Data Studio”

This presentation was more the style of what I was expecting of most of the sessions I chose today, but it once again covered completely different information than what I thought it would. This session was different than what I expected because I was not aware that “Data Transforms” is an Oracle product; I thought that it was being used as a general term in the title. If I had known that the presentation would be covering a specific service, I would have had a better understanding of what I was about to learn. My confusion of expectations did not make the presentation unenjoyable or uninformative, though.

What I learned from this session is that Oracle has two different ETL platforms available to move data around, similar to how Microsoft has SSIS for SQL Server (and other databases). Data Transforms was the service covered by this session, but they did mention Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) which is another, older ETL service. Data Transforms can move data between tons of different types of databases, not just Oracle, and it seemed to have a lot of interesting and easy to use ETL capabilities. It seems like they are trying to make this tool be the data flow tool of the future, especially since they covered 3 different features that are about to be added, like vector search/query capabilities. Although I haven’t had the chance to use this tool myself, I want to temper the expectations for what it can accomplish due to my own personal experiences with other Oracle services. Maybe it’s as fantastic and as useful as they say it is, or maybe it’s just another sales pitch that is better than the real user experience. If you have personal experience, good or bad, with Data Transforms I would love to hear about it in the comments below.

Keynote Session 2: “Oracle Vision and Strategy”

Of all the sessions today, I think this one had the most interesting pieces of information, although none of it was directly applicable to me or my company. The biggest downside of this keynote was that it went way over time, so I had to head out before the end of it. The two major topics of the keynote, presented by Larry Ellison, the founder and CTO of Oracle, were the joining of Oracle Cloud with the other major cloud providers and then covering various different topics surrounding artificial intelligence and how they want to use it to fix all the problems of the application and database development world.

While I like the idea of them putting Oracle databases into the other cloud platforms–Google Cloud Platform, AWS, and Azure–because it gives me hope that maybe one day we could migrate our Oracle databases to a less fragile ecosystem, it did leave me wondering if one day in the future there will just be one single mega-cloud system and monopoly originating from the combination of the current big four (but maybe I’ve just been reading too many dystopian novels lately).

I thought the second part of the keynote, surrounding current and potential uses of AI integration with other software systems, was more interesting and also a bit scary. Interesting in that automating mundane and error-prone processes makes our lives as database developers and administrators easier. There are so many things Mr. Ellison mentioned automating with AI that sounded great and useful to me. But it also scared me a bit, as it felt like there was an undertone of invasiveness being discussed under the guise of security. Security, on the technological and physical level, is important for individuals, groups, and even our whole country, but I personally believe security should not come at the cost of personal freedom and privacy. Some of the proposed and planned uses of AI, specifically how it relates to biometric authentication for every aspect of our lives, left me feeling a little uneasy (but once again, maybe it’s due to the large number of dystopian books I’ve read lately).

“Access Governance: The Key to Ensuring the Survival of Our Digital Lives”

I think this session was the best presentation of the day, as far as straight communication abilities go. The team of presenters was very well put together and knew their topics well without having to read off their slides at all, and I really appreciated that.

The topic of this session was once again about managing who can access what, including the use of Identity and Access Management (IAM) as one of the core topics. The presentation was lead by a member of the Oracle leadership team, who was accompanied by three Oracle customers, including a senior security engineer from Uber. Hearing from the different customers about their experience using IAM in general, not just the Oracle services, offered a great perspective on managing access to applications and databases, and gave me some ideas to take back to my own work. The main Oracle services covered were Oracle Access Governance and the Intelligent Access Dashboard, which I’ll need to do further research on myself now.

“AI-Based Autoscaling with Avesha for Simplified OKE Management on OCI”

This was my last session of the day, and although I was tired and dreaming of my hotel room, I did find it to be another interesting presentation, although not super applicable to my work life. The title is quite a mouthful, but what it covered was how a small company called Avesha has created 4 different tools to help you autoscale and manage Kubernetes clusters in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Their 4 tools all seemed like they would be very useful for people who are working with Kubernetes in Oracle, since apparently the autoscaling in OCI doesn’t always work as well as people want it to (coming from comments from the audience during the Q&A at the end of the presentation).

While I don’t think my company will be using any of Avesha’s tools anytime soon, they did seem like they could be extremely useful to other organizations. And the presenters definitely understood their own products, down to the fine details of how they work, which is always a green flag I appreciate with software vendors.

Summary

Wooh, that was a lot of information to recap and cover for a blog post! After attending these six sessions on this first day of Oracle Cloud World, I’m a little bit overwhelmed an exhausted, and not quite ready for another day and a half of more info dumps. But that’s okay because it’s what’s to be expected from conferences like this. I am hoping that the sessions I picked for tomorrow are more applicable to my current role, but even if they aren’t, I’m sure I’ll learn more interesting things throughout the day.

November 28, 2023 / 0 Comments

Highlights of PASS Data Community Summit 2023

This year I was able to attend the PASS Data Community Summit for the first time, and it was also the first time I had ever attended a professional conference in my career. Not only did I learn more than I expected about new and existing databases and tools, but I was also able to meet many interesting new people that I never would have been able to connect with otherwise. Each of the people I chatted with at various points throughout the conference had a unique story to share and was more than happy to introduce themselves, share their experience, and offer me help going forward if I need it. Going in as someone who’s never been to such an event before, I was relieved to find that I was fully welcomed and not made to feel like an outsider.

While I really enjoyed meeting so many new people from all around the world (I can’t believe how far some people traveled!), the best part of the conference was learning about many new and useful topics. These are the most interesting highlight items I learned across the three days of the conference:

Red-Gate Test Data Manager

I think this was the most exciting thing I learned while at the conference because it would be the most beneficial for my job and company. Currently, my organization has a homegrown tool that pulls down a subset of test data (from our QA environment) to each developer’s local database. While this tool is useful and has been mostly sufficient for us since it was created, it’s becoming harder to maintain and less useful to developers over time. The main issue we have with our custom tool is that it’s set to only pull down 500,000 records for any given table, with no regard (for the most part) for getting useful data for testing. Often, when trying to test a complicated or totally new process, the data subset either isn’t enough records or the records aren’t what is needed for testing.

That is why the Test Data Manager (TDM) from Red-Gate is so interesting to me. It solves all of the problems we currently have with our custom tool plus more we hadn’t considered yet. It allows you to create a clone in less than a minute from production data (my organization’s tool currently takes a long time to pull down all of the data and it pulls from our QA environment which isn’t as good of a testing set). TDM also allows you to mask any Personal Identifiable Information (PII) while keeping that data relevant, related, and useful after it has been masked (our custom tool isn’t that smart). Additionally, you can select a premade subset of data for any given table (small or large) or you can specify your own custom type of subset (e.g. only pull customer data for 2022 customers), and the software will ensure the data stays related and meaningful as it creates the subset of data.

Unit testing for databases is possible

You might think this is obvious, but the fact that unit testing can be added to database code now is crazy and exciting to me. I figured that it would be possible to write unit tests for stored procedures since that’s just code, but there’s a whole world of possibilities for other ways to unit test databases using tools already created and perfected by others. The two main tools that were discussed in regards to database unit testing were tSQLt, an open-source testing framework, and Red-Gate’s SQL Test which utilizes that framework while also giving additional capabilities for your team. While I haven’t had a chance to try to use either of these tools yet, I look forward to exploring the world of unit testing. I would love to be able to have a way to automatically test database code changes, since currently, all testing of database-related code changes, whether it’s SQL or SSIS, must be done manually by someone else on my team (and testing resources have been scarce lately).

PostgreSQL (PGSQL) is similar but also really different from Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL)

Over the course of the Summit, I went to many different sessions related to PostgreSQL, some of them more helpful than others. What I learned is that there are multiple different tools in the AWS platform that could be useful to others to help in their transition from MSSQL to PGSQL, but those tools might not be as useful to my company. We are considering a full transition to PGSQL in the coming years for cost savings, which means that we will want to completely move our current application systems from one engine to the other.

One of the AWS services I learned about that didn’t seem like it would be as helpful to us is BabelFish, which is a service that allows you to create an instance of PGSQL in AWS and still use your existing TSQL queries to interact with the database. This service seems like it would be very helpful for anyone who is looking to migrate a single database instance, or maybe up to a few, to PGSQL without having to rewrite their entire codebase, since it lets you keep working with your same application code. BabelFish probably won’t be helpful to my team in our migration efforts since we do want to do the full switch, so there would be no need to spin up BabelFish instances that we would later have to migrate fully anyway (especially since we’re looking at moving dozens of databases).

The other AWS services that were discussed for migration from MSSQL to PGSQL, Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) and Database Migration Service (DMS), seem like they would be closer to what my organization needs for our transition to Postgres. These tools allow you to convert most of your existing TSQL codebase to Postgres without any work on your part. However, AWS doesn’t claim that the converted code is going to be aligned with PGSQL best practices or will be performant, so that could be a challenge we’ll have to deal with later. The first half of the migration process with these tools is SCT which does the conversion of tables, schemas, functions, procedures, etc. from TSQL to PL/PGSQL Then the second half of the toolset, the DMS, would help with moving the data from one server to another. If I was going to guess how my organization is going to manage the transition from one engine to another, I would say that we’ll likely use these two tools to get us started, recognizing that they won’t get us 100% converted and we’ll have to do some manual conversions ourselves as well.

The last thing I learned about how Postgres differs from Microsoft SQL Server is that the indexing system is much more customizable and specific in PGSQL than in MSSQL, and that means I will need to learn a lot about indexes in the former. MSSQL only has a few different index types you can use, clustered, nonclustered, and columnstore, while PGSQL has at least 5 or 6 different kinds that are built for very specific use cases. While it may be a bit confusing to me, a career-long Microsoft database developer, to figure out the different types of Postgres indexes available when we start the transition, I’m going to focus on what an interesting learning opportunity it is. This will be the first large database engine change I will have in my career, and learning a new system will make me a better developer and a more lucrative job candidate in the future.

AI is being added to tools many of us use daily, to help us work more efficiently so we can do the more important and interesting work

This is one of my final takeaways from the conference, but I don’t think it will be quite as useful or relevant for my current role as the other things I listed above. A large part of the sessions at the Summit this year were focused on how AI is going to start changing how we work, and that we are going to need to adapt and learn how to use it to benefit ourselves instead of being left in the technological dust by refusing to use it. AI certainly isn’t going to be stealing our jobs in the next couple of years, but it will change how we work so we should prepare for that.

For myself, I plan on using AI tools currently available (mainly ChatGPT) to try to help me be more efficient in my role, probably with non-coding tasks such as writing emails and documentation. AI can help you work much more efficiently so you can spend most of your time on what is most important to you and your company instead of the mundane daily tasks that hog your time. That is the most exciting takeaway from the AI discussions I attended at PASS.

In the future, when other new AI tools, such as Red-Gate’s SQL Prompt+ (which was announced at the conference) are released, I also intend to play around with those to see how they might increase my work efficiency. The demo that the Red-Gate team gave for how SQL Prompt+ can be used is to highlight a query in a stored procedure and ask the tool for recommendations on how to improve the performance of the query. While I guarantee the tool is going to make a lot of bad suggestions that a human can easily tell won’t improve anything, I also think that it may provide a good starting point for investigating underperforming queries that you may not have thought of yourself. That is why I go back to my point of AI not taking our coding jobs in the near future but it becoming a great resource for making your job easier.

The concept of AI in general is a bit frightening (as a lover of sci-fi and horror books and movies), but it’s not likely to take over the world anytime soon. However, it may trickle into your workplace in the next few years so it’s better to confront change head-on and figure out how you can use these new tools to your advantage.

Summary

I hope that in the future, I’ll be able to attend more of the PASS Summit events since this year’s conference proved to be such a fun and relatively easy way to learn a lot of new information relevant to my career. Whether you’re newer in your career like me or an old hat in the trade, I really would recommend attending the next PASS Data Community Summit if you’re able to. You never know what you’ll learn that could improve your work life and make you a better developer.

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