Ah, yes, it’s that RMOUG Training Days time of the year again! As a techie, I didn’t put a lot of time into my slides when I first started presenting, thinking I’d simply dazzle them with my amazing knowledge. What I found is that slide deck skills don’t just help your presentation, they help you tell the story better, which should be the goal of every presenter. No matter how technical we are, we most likely haven’t had any formal Powerpoint training and as I’ve been upping my “PPT skills” this last year, I thought I’d share with the rest of the…
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Delphix focuses on virtualizing non-production environments, easing the pressure on DBAs, resources and budget, but there is a second use case for product that we don’t discuss nearly enough. Protection from data loss. Jamie Pope, one of the great guys that works in our pre-sales engineering group, sent Adam and I an article on one of those situations that makes any DBA, (or an entire business, for that matters) cringe. GitLab.com was performing some simple maintenance and someone deleted the wrong directory, removing over 300G of production data from their system. It appears they were first going to use PostgreSQL…
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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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I don’t want to alarm you, but there’s a new Delphix trial on AWS! It uses your own AWS account and with a simple set up, allows you to deploy a trial Delphix environment. Yes, you hear me right- just with a couple steps, you could have your own setup to work with Delphix! There’s documentation to make it simple to deploy, simple to understand and then use cases for individuals determined by their focus, (IT Architect, Developer, Database Administrator, etc.) This was a huge undertaking and I’m incredibly proud of Delphix to be offering this to the community! So…
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So you’ve deployed targets with Delphix on AWS and you receive the following error: It’s only a warning, but it states that you’re default of 87380 is below the recommended second value for the ipv4.tcp.rmem property. Is this really an issue and do you need to resolve it? As usual, the answer is “it depends” and its all about on how important performance is to you. What is net.ipv4.tcp.rmem? To answer this question, we need to understand network performance. I’m no network admin, so I am far from an expert on this topic, but as I’ve worked more often in…
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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 make some odd New Year’s Resolutions and mine for 2017 was to add some smart home solutions to our home that made sense. I’ve seen what can happen if you don’t plan these types of projects out well, (looking at you, Mark Rittman!) and the insanity that ensues! The following smart home goals were made: Main lights Prime power outlets thermostat music center Roku/TV The following technology would be used to accomplish the goals: Echo Dot, (3) Phillips Hue Bridge, (2) and lightbulbs, (8) TP-link smart plugs, (2) Ecobee Lite 3 Thermostat Raspberry Pi and Python Code The Echo…
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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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We, DBAs, have a tendency to over think everything. I don’t know if the trait to over think is just found in DBAs or if we see it in other technical positions, too. I believe it corresponds to some of why we become loyal to one technology or platform. We become accustomed to how something works and it’s difficult for us to let go of that knowledge and branch out into something new. We also hate asking questions- we should just be able to figure it out, which is why we love blog posts and simple documentation. Just give us the…
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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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The only thing that remains constant is change. ~Heralitus This often is more apparent in technology than anywhere else. Even with a group of Oracle evangelists and enthusiasts like the ACE program, which offers the opportunity for peers to recognize those that contribute to the community and help make it a better place. I’ve [often quietly] assisted many around me to find their path into the ACE program, even when I was an employee at Oracle and even now that I have ACE alumni status. It was once a rare thing to have this status, but I was also considered…
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On the first day with Delphix, I provisioned with glee, an IT Manager Happy. On the second day with Delphix, I provisioned with glee, two SAP ASE and an IT Manager Happy. On the third day with Delphix, I provisioned with glee, three Oracle Databases, two SAP ASE and an IT Manager Happy. On the fourth day with Delphix, I provisioned with glee, four EBS Clones, three Oracle Databases, two SAP ASE and an IT Manager Happy. On the fifth day with Delphix, I provisioned with glee… Five Cloud Migrations! Four EBS Clones, three Oracle Databases, two SAP ASE 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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I thought I’d do something on Oracle this week, but then Microsoft made an announcement that was like an early Christmas present- SQL Server release for Linux. I work for a company that supports Oracle and SQL Server, so I wanted to know how *real* this release was. I first wanted to test it out on a new build and as they recommend, along as link to an Ubuntu install, I created a new VM and started from there- Ubuntu Repository Challenge There were a couple packages that were missing until the repository is updated to pull universe by adding…
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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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It’s Friday and the last day of my first Summit conference. I’ve wanted to attend this conference for quite a few years, but with my focus on the Oracle side and scheduling date so close to Oracle Open World, I couldn’t justify it before joining Delphix. When I was offered a spot to join the Delphix team and attend, I jumped at the opportunity. Look at this booth and these impressively talented Delphix employees- how could you resist?? Pass Summit 2016 The Summit event has around 5000 attendees and is held in Seattle each year around the last week of…