Swingbench is a one of the best choices for easy loads on a database. I wanted to use it against the SH sample schema I loaded into my Oracle Source database and I haven’t used Swingbench outside of the command line quite a while back, (my databases seem to always come with a load on them!) so it was time to update my Swingbench skills and catch up with the user interface. Thanks to Dominic Giles for keeping the download, features and documentation so well maintained. After adding the application rights to run on my Macbook Pro, I was impressed by…
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Most people know I like to do things the hard way… 🙂 When it comes to learning things, there’s often no better way to get a strong understanding than to have to take something apart and put it back together. I wanted to use swingbench on my AWS deployment and needed the Sales History, (SH) sample schema. I don’t have an interface to perform the installation via the configuration manager, so I was going to install it manually. Surprise, the scripts in the $ORACLE_HOME/demo/schema/sh directory were missing. There are a couple options to solve this dilemma. Mine was to first get the…
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We’ve been working hard to create an incredible new trial version of Delphix that uses AWS, which is built with the open source product Terraform. Terraform is a tool that anyone can use to build, version and manage a product effectively and seamlessly in a number of clouds. We are currently using it to implement to AWS, but there is a bright future for these types of open source products and I’m really impressed with how easy its made it to deploy compute instances, the Delphix Engine and supporting architecture on AWS EC2. If you’d like to read up on Terraform,…
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I ran across an article from 2013 from Straight Talk on Agile Development by Alex Kuznetsov and it reminded me how long we’ve been battling for easier ways of doing agile in a RDBMS environments. Getting comfortable with a virtualized environment can be an odd experience for most DBAs, but as soon as you recognize how similar it is to a standard environment, we stop over-thinking it and it makes it quite simple to then implement agile with even petabytes of data in an relational environment without using slow and archaic processes. The second effect of this is to realize that we…
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There are more configurations for AWS than there are fish in the sea, but as the rush of folks arrive to test out the incredibly cool AWS Trial for Delphix, I’ll add my rendition of what to look for to know you’re AWS setup is prepped to successfully deploy. The EC2 Dashboard View After you’ve selected your location, set up your security user/group and key pairs, there’s a quick way to see, (at least high level) if you’re ready to deploy the AWS Trial to the zone in question. Go to your EC2 Dashboard and to the location, (Zone) that…
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I’ve been at Delphix for just over six months now. In that time, I was working with a number of great people on a number of initiatives surrounding competitive, the company roadmap and some new initiatives. With the introduction of our CEO, Chris Cook, new CMO, Michelle Kerr and other pivotal positions within this growing company, it became apparent that we’d be redirecting our focus on Delphix’s message and connections within the community. I was still quite involved in the community, even though my speaking had been trimmed down considerably with the other demands at Delphix. Even though I wasn’t submitting abstracts to…
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So Brent Ozar’s group of geeks did something that I highly support- a survey of data professional’s salaries. Anyone who knows me, knows I live by data and I’m all about transparency. The data from the survey is available for download from the site and they’re promoting app developers to download the Excel spreadsheet of the raw data and work with it. Now I’m a bit busy with work as the Technical Intelligence Manager at Delphix and a little conference that I’m the director for, called RMOUG Training Days, which is less than a month from now, but I couldn’t resist…
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I receive about 20-30 messages a week from women in the industry. I take my role in the Oracle community as a role model for women in technology quite seriously and I’ve somehow ended up speaking up a number of times, upon request from different groups. Although its not the first time the topics come up, I was asked last week for some recommendations on Oracle’s CEO, Safra Catz and her opportunity to be on President Elect Trump’s transition team. I wanted to ask your opinion about Safra not taking a leave of absence to help with Trump’s transition team? I…
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How was 2016 for me? It was a surprisingly busy year- blogging, speaking, working and doing. I posted just under 100 posts to my blog this year. After I changed jobs, the “3 per week” quickly declined to “4 per month” after I was inundated with new challenges and the Delphix learning curve. That will change for 2017, along with some new initiatives that are in the works, so stay tuned. For 2016, the most popular posts and pages for my website followed a similar trend from the last year. My emulator for RPI is still a popular item and…
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UPDATE- I want to thank everyone who supported this post and reached out to me about the challenges of managing and working with user group events. This post, as with other’s I’ve written on different topics, (I have quite the knack to say what most just think, don’t I? :)) struck a nerve in the community, but it was also very timely with a mission that Nichole Scott, Oracle’s North America User Group Senior Manager, was working to address. Nichole was kind enough to reach out to me after reading the blog post and a good discussion on what occurred, (both…
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I love technology- ALL TECHNOLOGY. This includes loving my Mac Air and loving my Microsoft Surface Pro 4. I’ve recently went back to a Mac when I joined Delphix, trimming down the power I had on my Surface Pro 4, knowing the content I was providing would be required to run on hardware with lesser resources. With the release of Microsoft SQL Server 2016 on Linux, I jumped in with both feet and wanted to install it on one of my Linux VMs that I have “discovered” with my Delphix engine and its Oracle environment. To accomplish this, the…
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The challenge of coding, is that you sometimes need to be aware of what can be impacted outside of your code to make it appear guilty. I wrote a blog post a short time back on my first time scripting with Apple Script with a goal of automating my weekly status reports to my new manager of my tasks in OmniFocus. After seeing some cool stuff one of my peers did with their setup in OmniFocus, I built out mine to do something similar. What I didn’t realize, was that my code was significantly dependent on my original setup and…
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OK, so I’m all over the map, (technology wise) right now. One day I’m working with data masking on Oracle, the next it’s SQL Server or MySQL, and the next its DB2. After almost six months of this, the chaos of feeling like a fast food drive thru with 20 lanes open at all times is starting to make sense and my brain is starting to find efficient ways to siphon all this information into the correct “lanes”. No longer is the lane that asked for a hamburger getting fries with hot sauce… 🙂 One of the areas that I’ve…
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I’ve been involved in two data masking projects in my time as a database administrator. One was to mask and secure credit card numbers and the other was to protect personally identifiable information, (PII) for a demographics company. I remember the pain, but it was better than what could have happened if we hadn’t protected customer data…. Times have changed and now, as part of a company that has a serious market focus on data masking, my role has time allocated to research on data protection, data masking and understanding the technical requirements. Reasons to Mask The percentage of companies…
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Anyone who’s anyone knows to search out OakTable World at major events in the US and Europe, and Oracle Open World 2016 is no different! OakTable World 2016, (#otw16) will be held at the Children’s Creativity Museum again this year during the week of Oracle Open World. The Oak Table members will be discussing their latest technical obsessions and research on Monday and Tuesday, (September 19th-20th). The truth is, folks- The Oak Table experts are an AWESOME group, (if I don’t say so myself! :)) as we could have easily done another day of incredible sessions, but alas, two days is all we have…
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For those of you that downloaded and are starting to work with Delphix Express, (because you’re the cool kids… :)) You may have noticed that there is an Express Edition Oracle 11g database out there you could use as a Dsource, (source database for Delphix to clone and virtualize…) If you’d like to work with this free version with your Delphix Express environment, these are the steps that I performed to allow me to utilize it. My setup is as follows: VMWare Fusions 8 Chrome Browser Delphix is upgraded to the latest VM release Although we start the environment from…
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Delphix Express offers a virtual environment to work with all the cool features like data virtualization and data masking on just a workstation or even a laptop. The product has an immense offering, so no matter how hard Kyle, Adam and the other folks worked on this labor of love, there’s bound to be some manual configurations that are required to ensure you get the most from the product. This is where I thought I’d help and offer a virtual hug to go along with the virtual images…:) If you’re already set on installing and working<– (Link here!!) with Delphix Express, you will find the…
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How many times have you had maintenance or a release complete and everyone is sure that everything’s been put back the way it should have been, all t’s crossed, all i’s dotted and then you release it to the customers only to find out that NOPE, something was forgotten in the moving parts of technology? As the Database Administrator, you can do a bit of CYA and not be the one who has to say- Having the ability to compare targets is a powerful feature in Enterprise Manager 13c, (and 12c, don’t feel left out there…:)) The comparison feature is the…