Podcasts about Database administrator

William Barnette is a Senior Project Manager focused on Digital Manufacturing at Kraft Heinz. William is an Application Developer, Database Administrator, and Project Manager in a wide variety of business applications. He has created everything from full blown applications to thousands of scripts for end users. William is a Visual Basic, VBA and VB script specialist. William has worked at Kraft Heinz for over 34 years. The Industry 4.0 Podcast with Grantek delivers a look into the world of manufacturing, with a focus on stories and trends that lead to better solutions.   Our guests will share tips and outcomes that will help improve your productivity. You will hear from leading providers of Industrial Control System hardware and software, Grantek experts and leaders at best-in-class industry associations that serve Life Sciences and Food & Beverage manufactures.

In this two-part special, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham delve into the critical topic of backup and recovery in Oracle Database 23ai.   Together with Bill Millar, Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor, they discuss the role of database administrators, strategies for protecting data, and dealing with various types of data failure.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-backup-and-recovery/141127/   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi there! For the last two weeks, we've been having really exciting discussions on Oracle AI Vector Search. We covered the fundamentals, benefits, the vector workflow, and lots more. Today, we're going to talk about backup and recovery in Oracle Database 23ai with Bill Millar. If you've been listening this season, you'll know that Bill is a Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor with Oracle University. Nikita: In this two-part special, we'll dive into some of the things you need to know about backup and recovery, especially if you're a database and backup admin. So, if you're the person in charge of keeping data safe and handling disaster recovery, this is definitely worth your time. 01:20 Lois: That's right, Niki. Hi Bill, thanks for joining us again. What's the role of a Database Administrator, or DBA, when it comes to backup and recovery? Bill: The DBA is typically responsible for ensuring the database is open and available when needed and at times you need to work with system administrators and other people within your organization to achieve that. But we want to try to protect the database from failure wherever possible. We want to increase the mean time between failures. Hopefully, we don't have failures, and we have to increase that time. But it might mean that we need to ensure we have redundant hardware and that in place, again, maybe out of the realm of the DBA, but people within your organization can help with that. We want to protect those critical components by using the redundancy. And we want to decrease the mean time to recover. Failures happen, but how fast can we get access back to that data after that failure. The faster we can do it, the happier customers are. Minimize the loss of data. It's never good to lose data, especially in a critical environment, but maybe in test and development, maybe not so bad.  02:39 Nikita: How do we ensure a separation of duties for backup and recovery processes? Bill: For a separation of duties, we do have a user called SYSBACKUP. It has the privileges that's required to perform backup and recoveries, the privilege to connect and execute the commands in what we refer to as RMAN, our Recovery Manager. As I said, it has permissions for backup and recovery because you do need to shut down the database, start up the database, those type of things. We're able to connect to that closed database to try to troubleshoot it, to get it to the open state again. It does not include any privileges to access data. The SYSBACKUP user is created when we install the database, when we create the database. We can use it explicitly for privileged user connection. It allows us to connect to the database. So RMAN connects as SYSBACKUP. 03:37 Lois: Bill, what should people keep in mind when figuring out what's considered critical data? Bill: You want to try to identify your critical data. Some data might be highly required to access and make sure we don't lose don't lose data, but then you might have some environments. OK, I don't need to have them up and running as fast. If we lose a little data, it may not hurt, but we want to identify the difference in the different data that we have on different environments. So we want to also prioritize that critical data, which data do we need access to first because how much will the company lose per hour of downtime because we can't do business. We want to make sure the access data protection requirements. Not everybody has access to everything. And there are different types of disaster that can happen that are going to be totally out of your control. There's the physical disaster, a hurricane or tornado, outages, power outages, component failures, failures within the building itself, corruption of data because of some of these failures. And then, the most dreaded one, the one that happens most often, usually those human errors, the logical errors, where the data is just bad, we are able to access and everything. It's just that something has changed that shouldn't have been changed. We want to make sure we access our recovery requirements.  05:04 Lois: So, what are they? What are those requirements? Bill: We want to base that requirement based on how critical is that data, how soon do we need to have access to that? What is our recovery point objective? Do we have a tolerance for any type of data loss? How frequently should we backups? How often they should be taken? What type of backups will be another thing we'll want to figure out? Is point-in-time recovery required? Are we able to or do we ever need to go back to a previous point in time to do something? It's not always just recovery for a database failure. We might need to do a recovery point in time to a different system so we can investigate something. What is my recovery time objective? Again, what is the tolerance for the downtime? How long can I be down? The downtime, the biggest part of when a system goes down is trying to identify what is the problem, then next is what is going to be my plan to recover, and then perform in the recovery. We might have a tiered required time objective based off of critical data, and then depending on the failure. Is that failure at the entire database? Is it just a tablespace? Is it just a table? Is it just a row? That also determines how long it takes to recover and what type of recovery we might try to perform. What is my backup retention policy? Do I have a requirement to where I have to have my backups off site? And it doesn't mean like back in the old days of mainframe computers, you'd back up to tape and you'd take those tapes off site. You might still do that today. Or, am I backing up to a cloud environment? So what do I need to have for that? What about long-term backups? We work with our day-to-day backups, but there's those backups that require for longer, archives like end of year backups. Some places require to keep their end of year backup for like 10 years. How are we going to handle that? So these are some of the things that we have to think about when we start talking about backup and recovery. 07:23 Did you know that the Oracle University Learning Community regularly holds live events hosted by Oracle expert instructors. Find out how to prepare for your certification exams. Learn about the latest technology advances and features. Ask questions in real time and learn from an Oracle subject matter expert. From Ask Me Anything about certification to Ask the Instructor coaching sessions, you'll be able to achieve your learning goals for 2024 in no time. Join a live event today and witness firsthand the transformative power of the Oracle University Learning Community. Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 08:04 Nikita: Welcome back! Bill, I want to talk about the different failures that can occur in an Oracle database. How would you categorize them? Bill: There are different category of failure. This is not an all-inclusive list by any means. It's just something that possibly can happen. So they can usually be divided into different categories like statement failure. All right. When doing a select and insert, update, delete, the statement itself fails. A user process fails. Single database session fails for some reason. Network failure, connectivity is lost. The user error, probably one of the most common ones we have to deal with. A user successfully completes an operation, but that operation was erroneous. They dropped the wrong table, updated the wrong row. Then there's the instance failure. The database itself shuts down unexpectedly. And then media failure, usually a hard failure of our disk. Something of memory, something failed and caused an error. 09:12 Lois: Ok. I want to dive a little deeper into each of these categories that you mentioned. Let's start with statement failures. What are typical problems that one might face? Bill: Attempts to enter invalid data into a table. They're trying to put a numeric field in a date field, and usually just working with the user is going to correct that. Is that the DBA responsible? Yes, no, maybe. They attempt to form operations with insufficient privileges. Attempts to allocate space that fails, well, that depends on are they going-- do they have unlimited storage or do they have a limit? Logic errors in the application. Well, that's where we're going to have to work with those developers to try to correct those type of errors. 09:59 Nikita: What about user process failures? Bill: User performs an abnormal disconnect, doesn't close out properly. It can cause something to hang up or even possibly erroneous data to be updated. A user session is abnormally terminated. Well, usually, we don't have to try to resolve those user type errors, but something we might need to look into. A user experiences a program error that terminates the session. Again, usually it's the application developers, but it's something as a DBA, we might want to keep an eye on. Is it the same person? Is it from the same location? Is it the same module within that application? Maybe there's some things we can help to identify what the possible problem can be. 10:43 Nikita: Bill, tell us about common issues that can lead to network failures. What can we do to mitigate these problems and ensure network resilience? Bill: The listener fails. Well, we can connect a backup listener and configure how it can connect time failover can work. A network interface card fails. Well, again, we're not the hardware people, but can we work with our network, our server team, whatever, to possibly have redundant network cards? The network connection fails itself. Can we configure a backup network connection? 11:18 Lois: And what about user errors? How can we recover from those types of scenarios? Bill: The user inadvertently deletes or modifies data. Well, we have some things we'll look at as far as like rollback a transaction along with the dependent transactions. Rewind that table back to where it should have been. You're also can use LogMiner. You can look at our redo logs to try to figure out where that bad transaction was. User drops a table inadvertently. Well, we can recover the table from the recycle bin if we have the recycle bin on or we may need to recover from a backup. 11:56 Nikita: What are common causes of instance failures, Bill? Bill: The dreaded power outage. Well, hopefully, we have some type of up system to keep us running, even if it's not for continuous operation. Maybe if it's just to allow us to gracefully take a system down. The dreaded hardware failure. If you have a way to predict a hardware failure, you can make a lot of money. Always happens at the most inopportune times. But then again, do we have redundant hardware? Do we have something in place to help allow us to continue to operate in case of a hardware failure? Failure of one of the critical background processes. Why did it fail? We can go out. We can look at our alert log, we have trace files. And then we have, you have the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. We can do the same thing as looking at the alert log and trace files. But the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control gives us a GUI interface to allow us to do that. 12:53 Lois: Before we let you go, Bill, can you tell us about media and data failures? Bill: Failure of a disk drive, failure of a disk controller, deletion or corruption of a file needed for database operation, well, this is the dreaded media failure. So we're going to restore from a backup. If we need to move, we can move a data file to a different location. We can notify, hey, here's that new location. And then recover by applying any of the incremental backups, any of the redo to get it back to where it should be. And then we have the data failures. We can't access the component, missing data files at OS level. And maybe our system administrators deleted something thinking it wasn't needed, or maybe even a developer on a development type system. Don't have the right permissions. Tablespace is offline. Well, why is it offline? Did somebody took the wrong tablespace offline? We have physical corruptions, block checksum failures. It's inconsistent between the header and footer. Invalid block header field values, like all of them are zeroed out. Then we have the logical corruptions, inconsistent dictionary, corrupt row piece, the inconsistencies, a control file not synchronized with the data files, usually because we recovered something and didn't do it the right way. I/O failures, maybe we just exceeded the number of open files that we're allowed to have. Maybe it's just a network or an I/O error itself. And these are different types of failures that you might experience. Again, it's not an all-inclusive list. It's just a few examples. 14:41 Nikita: I know you said it's not an all-inclusive list and you were just giving us a few examples, but that seemed quite thorough! Thank you so much, Bill, for walking us through all of that today! Lois: Yeah, I totally agree! Thanks Bill! For more on what we discussed today, visit mylearn.oracle.com. Search for the Oracle Database 23ai: Backup and Recovery course. Next week, we'll get into instance recovery and recovery strategies. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 15:15 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

Dave sits down with a Database Administrator who shares why a focus on Mindset was exactly what her business needed! Subscribe to Legendary Marketer on Youtube Follow Legendary Marketer on Facebook Follow Dave on Instagram Follow Lupe on Instagram

An airhacks.fm conversation with Gerald Venzl (@GeraldVenzl) about: from a 386 computer with SimCity to Oracle's database evangelist, early interest in computer hardware and software, apprenticeship as a programmer in Austria, work experience with Oracle database and PLSQL, Steven Feuerstein, PLSQL expert, career moves to New York, London, and San Francisco, role as product manager and team leader at Oracle, efforts to attract developers to Oracle technologies, involvement in Oracle ACE Program, work on docker files for Oracle Database, challenges with ARM port for Mac, popular JavaOne talk on optimizing Java code for database performance, discussion of Oracle's various database technologies including NoSQL and TimesTen, importance of educating developers on database best practices, evolution of database performance techniques, future topics for discussion including Oracle architecture, Java integration, and business logic in databases, Gerald's team of evangelists across Europe, ways to contact Gerald and his team for speaking engagements or information Gerald Venzl on twitter: @GeraldVenzl

Join hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Hope Fisher, Oracle's Product Manager for Database Technologies, as they break down the basics of databases, explore different database management systems, and delve into database development.   Whether you're a newcomer or just need a refresher, this quick, informative episode is sure to offer you some valuable insights.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/database-essentials/133032/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Nikita: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I'm Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi there! For the last seven weeks, we've been exploring the world of OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes with our senior instructor Mahendra Mehra. We covered key aspects of OKE to help you create, manage, and optimize Kubernetes clusters in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. So, be sure you check out those episodes if you're interested in Kubernetes. 01:00 Nikita: Today, we're doing something a little different. We've had a lot of episodes on different aspects of Oracle Database, but what if you're just getting started in this world? We wanted you to have something that you could listen to as well. And so we have Hope Fisher with us today. Hope is a Product Manager for Database Technologies at Oracle, and we're going to ask her to take us through the basics of database, the different database management systems, and database development.  Lois: Hi Hope! Thanks for joining us for this episode. Before we dive straight into terminologies and concepts, I want to take a step back and really get down to the basics. We sometimes use the terms data and information interchangeably, but they're not the same, right? 01:43 Hope: Data is raw material or a set of facts and observations. Information is the meaning derived from the facts. The difference between data and information can be explained by using an example, such as test scores. In one class, if every student receives a numbered score and the scores can be calculated to determine a class average, the class average can be calculated to determine the school average. So in this scenario, each student's test score is one piece of data. And information is the class's average score or the school's average score. There is no value in data until you actually do something with it. 02:24 Nikita: Right, so then how do we make all this data useful? Do we create a database system?  Hope: A database system provides a simple function—treat data as a collection of information, organize it, and make the data usable by providing easy access to it and giving you a place where that data can be stored. Every organization needs to collect and maintain data to meet its requirements. Most organizations today use a database to automate their information systems. An information system can be defined as a formal system for storing and processing data. A database is an organized collection of data put together as a unit. The rationale of a database is to collect, store, and retrieve related data for use by database applications. A database application is a software program that interacts with the database to access and manipulate data. A database is usually managed by a Database Administrator, also known as a DBA. 03:25 Nikita: Hope, give us some examples of database systems. Hope: Popular examples of database systems include Oracle Database, MySQL, which is also owned by Oracle, Microsoft SQL server, Postgres, and others. There are relational database management systems. The acronym is DBMS. Some of the strengths of a DBMS include flexibility and scalability. Given the huge amounts of information that modern businesses need to handle, these are important factors to consider when surveying different types of databases. 03:59 Lois: This may seem a little bit silly, but why not just use spreadsheets, Hope? Why use databases? Hope: The easy answer is that spreadsheets are designed for specific problems, relatively small amounts of data and individual users. Databases are designed for lots of data, shared information use, and complex data analysis. Spreadsheets are typically used for specific problems or small amounts of data. Individual users generally use spreadsheets. In a database, cells contain records that come from external tables. Databases are designed for lots of data. They are intended to be shared and used for more complex data analysis. They need to be scalable, secure, and available to many users. This differentiation means that spreadsheets are static documents, while databases can be relational. 04:51 Nikita: Hope, what are some common database applications?  Hope: Database applications are used in far and wide use cases that most commonly can be grouped into three areas. Applications that run companies called enterprise applications. Enterprise applications are designed to integrate computer systems that run all phases of an enterprise's operations to facilitate cooperation and coordination of work across the enterprise. The intent is to integrate core business processes, like sales, accounting, finance, human resources, inventory, and manufacturing. Applications that do something very specific, like healthcare applications-- specialized software is software that's written for a specific task rather than for a broad application area.  And then there are also applications that are used to examine data and turn it into information, like a data warehouse, analytics, and data lake. 05:54 Lois: We've spoken about data lakes before. But since this is an episode about the basics of database, can you briefly tell us what a data lake is? Hope: A data lake is a place to store your structured and unstructured data as well as a method for organizing large volumes of highly diverse data from diverse sources. Data lakes are becoming increasingly important as people, especially in businesses and technology, want to perform broad data exploration and discovery. Bringing data together into a single place or most of it into a single place makes that simpler. 06:29 Nikita: Thanks for that, Hope. So, what kind of organizations use databases? And, who within these organizations uses databases the most? Hope: Almost every enterprise uses databases. Enterprises use databases for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways. Data and databases are part of almost any process of the enterprise. Data is being collected to help solve business needs and drive value. Many people in an organization work with databases. These include the application developers who create applications that support and drive the business. The database administrator or DBA maintains and updates the database. And the end user uses the data as needed. 07:19 Do you want to stay ahead of the curve in the ever-evolving AI  landscape? Look no further than our brand-new OCI Generative AI Professional course and certification. For a limited time only, we're offering both the course and certification for free. So, don't miss out on this exclusive opportunity to get certified on Generative AI at no cost. Act fast because this offer is valid only until July 31, 2024. Visit https://education.oracle.com/genai to get started. That's https://education.oracle.com/genai. 07:57 Nikita: Welcome back. Now that we've discussed foundational database concepts, I want to move on to database management systems. Take us through what a database management system is, Hope. Hope: A Database Management System, DBMS, has the following elements. The kernel code manages memory and storage for the DBMS. The repository of metadata is called a data dictionary. The query language enables applications to access the data. Oracle database functions include data definitions, storage, structure, and security. Additional functionality also provides for user access control, backup and recovery, integrity, and communications. There are many different database types and management systems. The most common is the relational database management system. 08:51 Nikita: And how do relational databases store data?  Hope: Essentially and very simplistically, there are key elements of the relational database. Database table containing rows and columns; the data in the table, which is stored a row at a time; and the columns which contain attributes or related information. And then the different tables in a database relate to one another and share a column. 09:17 Lois: Customers usually have a mix of applications and data structures, and ideally, they should be able to implement a data management strategy that effectively uses all of their data in applications, right? How does Oracle approach this?  Hope: Oracle's approach to this enterprise data management strategy and architecture is converged database to all different data types and workloads. The converged database is a database that has native support for all modern data types and, of course, traditional relational data.  By providing support for all of these data types, a converged database can run all sorts of workloads, from transaction processing to analytics and machine learning to blockchain to support the applications and systems. Oracle provides a single database engine that supports all data models, process types, and development environments. It also addresses many kinds of workloads against the same data sets. And there's no need to use dozens of specialized databases. Deploying several single-purpose databases would increase costs, complexity, and risk. 10:25 Nikita: In the final part of our conversation today, I want to bring up database development. Hope, how are databases developed?  Hope: Data modeling is the first part of the database development process. Conceptual data modeling is the examination of a business and business data to determine the structure of business information and the rules that govern it. This structure forms the basis for database design. A conceptual model is relatively stable over long periods of time. Physical data modeling, or database building, is concerned with implementation in each technical software and hardware environment. The physical implementation is highly dependent on the current state of technology and is subject to change as available technologies rapidly change. Conceptual model captures the functional and informational needs of a business and is used to identify important entities and their relationships.  A logical model includes the entities and relationships. This is also called an entity relationship model and provides the details of the relationships.  11:34 Lois: I think that's a good place to wrap up our episode. To know more about the Oracle Database architecture, offerings, and so on, visit mylearn.oracle.com. Thanks for joining us today, Hope.  Nikita: Join us next week for another episode of the Oracle University Podcast. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off! 11:55 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

**Set up a free 30 minute coaching discovery call with Lois on https://www.loisstrachan.com/contact-lois/ In today's episode, Lois speaks with Abida Mahomed about her work as a database administrator (DBA) using the Oracle platform. This is the latest episode of the Job Talk series, focusing on people with disabilities working in mainstream employment. Despite studying for a career in social work, Abida started working in a technical field on a platform that had limited accessibility for her as a blind user. During the conversation she discusses the changes she has experienced as the platform has become more inclusive of the needs of DBAs with visual conditions. Abida talks about her work, the skills she feels that make a good database administrator, and some of the challenges she has faced as a blind person working in a technical field. Reach out to Abida at: e-mail: abidamahomed@outlook.com Podcast Image description: A woman of Indian heritage with shoulder-length dark hair. She is wearing a sleeveless black top and a pendent on a necklace. She is sitting at an outdoor restaurant with people in the background, who are seated at a table shaded by a blue umbrella. I'd love to hear from you – contact me at Web: https://www.loisstrachan.com/ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/lstrachan Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/loisstrachanspeaker This episode edited by Craig Strachan using Hindenburg PRO – find out more on Hindenburg.com Credits and music by Charlie Dyasi of Naledi Media.

On this episode Greg chats with Dominique Carney, a multi disciplined technologists who went from studying and obtaining a degree in Anthropology to earning her Masters in Human Computer Interaction.Greg talks to Dominique about her tech journey which includes being a Database Administrator, to a Senior Security Analyst to a UX Researcher. Dominique also discusses becoming a subject matter expert in AI and Security.

Welcome to Compromising Positions! The tech podcast that asks non-cybersecurity professionals what we in the industry can do to make their lives easier and help make our organisations more prepared to face ever-changing human-centric cyber threats with your hosts Lianne Potter and Jeff Watkins! This week we have a very special guest, Reema Vadoliya. Reema is the passionate business founder of data consultancy, People of Data, a gifted storyteller, and a professional problem-solver. In this episode, Reema shares her insights on how to collaborate more effectively between cybersecurity and data professionals. She emphasizes the importance of empathetic communication, how sometimes quantifying risks is about gut feeling, not just metrics… We look at how we can use data-driven storytelling to engage and educate people about cybersecurity, including how to make our phishing simulation stats not only more interesting to non-cybersecurity people but also how to make it actually drive meaningful behavioural changes.Top 5 Takeaways for Building a Strong Data Culture and Cybersecurity:1. Collaboration is key: The best way to ensure data security is by fostering good relationships between cybersecurity and data teams. Encourage open communication and explain the importance of keeping data safe.2. Empathy is crucial: To solve problems effectively, it's important to understand the actual problem. Avoid closed questions and focus on the "why" behind the issue.3. Checklists can help: Consistent, repeatable, and reusable rules of engagement can prevent insecure practices and reduce the need for constant consultation with the security team.4. Quantifying risks is complex: Sometimes, you need to rely on gut feeling to balance a complex risk landscape. Business analysts can help identify potential risks that may have been overlooked.5. Start small: Building a strong data culture takes time. Start by removing barriers that make data feel unobtainable and use storytelling to help people understand complex concepts. Make better use of phishing data to tell better stories and improve outcomes.Links to everything we discuss in this episode can be found in the show notes and if you liked the show, please do leave us a review. Follow us on all good podcasting platforms and via our youtube channel, and don't forget to share on LinkedIin and in your teams. It really helps us spread the word and get high-quality guests, like Reema, on future episodes. We hope you enjoyed episode 7, If Data is the new oil, how do we prevent data spills? - See you next time, keep secure, and don't forget to ask yourself, ‘Am I the compromising position here?' Show NotesThe phrase ‘Data is the new oil' was coined by Clive Humby in 2006. In this, he meant that data, like oil, needs refinement and processing to turn it into something useful. We couldn't find the original conference in which Humby said this, but I did find an interesting article looking at this assertion years later called ‘Data is the new oil of the digital economy' by WIRED which is worth a read. As of November 2023, GDPR fines can be up to 20 million euros, or up to 4% of a company's global turnover of the preceding fiscal year (whichever is highest for the company found in breach of this regulation). A ‘DBA' is a Database Administrator'. A DBA is a person who manages, maintains, and secures data in one or more data systems so that a user can perform analysis for business operations. DBAs take care of data storage, organization, presentation, utilization, and analysis from a technical perspective.The meme Jeff was talking about is the ‘Prince or Popstar meme.' A nice write up of it can be found here. One of the best books at looking at the successes of checklists is Matthew Syed's thought-provoking book, Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success - highly recommended by team CP! Data in Practice: Systematizing data quality at Uber Uber's Data Blog About Reema VadoliyaReema is a passionate business founder, gifted storyteller and tireless advocate for inclusion in data. By challenging audiences to reshape their perception of data as a dreary necessity, she draws out the real human stories which organically empower intentional inclusion in data and beyond. After seven years and multiple roles in data, Reema decided to launch her new, trailblazing company, People of Data. Through this organisation she seeks to create a world in which data can be used as a springboard for understanding the real people that data represents.Reema is confident speaking about data strategy, analytical exploration, data collection and governance. Her talks offer a passionate manifesto for a world in which Equality, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (EDIB) are the beating heart of all data handling and usage. An experienced speaker not afraid of digging into the gristle of the difficult topics, Reema's talks push beyond a 1D (one demographic) view of data and offer a refreshing, multi-dimensional consideration of how humanised data can pioneer a brighter future.Links related to Reema VadoliyaReema's LinkedInReema's Consultancy, People of Data

Join Paulette and Mark for this conversation about Digital Forensics being a valuable asset in a divorce and not a solution. About Mark: Retired from the Army National Guard and over a decade working has a Database Administrator for several Defense Contractors, he began studying cellphone forensics when he suspected his spouse of having an affair. After using forensics in his own divorce he was encouraged to start Lost and Found Forensics to assist others. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thebetterdivorcepodcast/message

     Without question, Jensine Reeder is a lover of all people. The Greenville, SC, resident has a reputation for giving and pouring into others. She has intentionally made limitless connections across the beauty, technology, and nonprofit sectors and provided hope and opportunities while doing so.        Jensine's story reflects the life of someone who has refused to be denied or misled. She shares, “Family has always been important to me. I grew up in Greenville, SC, as the oldest of five siblings, and Southern Baptist ideals shaped my adolescent identity. While the church offered community, support, and love, it also led me to believe that money, specifically desiring money, is bad. I scraped by for years to make ends meet. I hoarded basic supplies like toilet paper and worked tirelessly for less than minimum wage to feed myself and my family. My efforts kept us fed, and we were alive but not truly living. I knew deep in my bones that I was capable of more, and we deserved more.”      Jensine says her career and entrepreneurship journeys taught her that wealth is not inherently evil. “I learned that money is neither good nor bad but simply a tool. What matters is how you use it. Money provides stability and offers opportunities. I wanted to allow my children to pursue their education, dreams, and passions and access the best care and resources money could buy. Furthermore, I never wanted my children to feel the suffocating fear of living paycheck to paycheck. So, I carved out a new career path for myself and climbed from minimum wage jobs to a salaried position,” she says. However, little did she know her journey out of poverty had only begun.      Today, Jensine owns Source Unlimited LLC, a consulting firm dedicated to connecting small businesses, nonprofit organizations, and corporations with the resources necessary to thrive professionally. “We offer nonprofit IT consulting services to ensure data collection procedures are efficient and accompanied by effective workflow processes,” Jensine says. “That enhanced efficiency better positions organizations for additional funding opportunities and enables organizations to tell their stories.”        One of the services offered by The Source Unlimited is Professional Nonprofit IT Consulting. Her goal is to ensure data collection software and procedures are efficient and accompanied by effective workflow processes. “This positions the organization for additional funding opportunities,” she says. Another product offered is Elevation Coaching™, designed for small business professionals, which offers small business establishment for Limited Liability Corporation (LLC), Incorporation (Inc), Sole Proprietorship, and Nonprofit (501(c)(3) establishment. Additionally, they offer coaching with a phased approach to growing their clients' businesses.      Another product offered, which is designed for individuals, is Elevation Coaching™. Jensine asks, “Are you ready for your elevation journey? We offer a process to tap into your highest self and elevate your thinking about yourself, your purpose, and your life!  My services are for anyone with a vision to start or expand their business and who needs guidance, support, and accountability.”       Jensine's creative side is displayed with Goddess Wraps by Jensine™, which was launched in 2021. She hand-makes vibrant satin-lined headwraps with 100% Cotton Ankara fabric lined with high-quality satin. She says the line resulted from her doing some soul-searching and learning what her life's purpose was. Annually, a portion of their sales are donated to organizations that focus on raising awareness about breast cancer and alopecia.  Additionally, Jensine provides virtual and in-person wrap services for photoshoots, date nights, weddings, birthday celebrations, anniversary events, and more.       Jensine says her journey in poverty began in 2012 while working as a paralegal at a private law firm. She overheard a conversation between the attorneys about a client who didn't understand their life of poverty. At that moment, Jensine learned there was a difference between being poor and being in poverty. “I was in shock because, according to my family and friends, I was doing well for myself because I had a good job, a car, and was renting a home. I then researched what career I could transition to in order to increase my income to make enough money to be above the federal poverty line,” she says.      Her next move was returning to college to get her degree in Computer Technology at Greenville Technical College. While being a full-time student, she worked on campus in the Engineering and Technology computer lab, an experience that allowed her to sharpen her skills and gain professional experience. Jensine shares that with the support of her family, friends, and church members, she graduated with honors in 2014 with a degree in Computer Technology.      Continuing her educational journey as a working mother required great personal sacrifice, Jensine confesses, but she was ready to pursue a career in technology. She soon started her consulting business, The Source Unlimited. In no time, doors began to open in her favor. Jensine says, “The United Way of Greenville County was searching for a Database Administrator. I applied and got the contract, and that seven-year opportunity helped me find my niche within the technology field. I also assisted over 222 Greenville County nonprofits with acquiring over $4 million in grant funding.” She was off and running, and The Source Unlimited LLC was birthed in 2014.      Jensine's new career helped her purchase her first home in 2015. “My children and I were so happy to have a place to call home,” she says. Her children also inspired her to share her story with others and pursue public speaking engagements throughout the Upstate community.   When asked what she loves most about her journey in business, Jensine says it's the opportunities she has to mentor entrepreneurs, business owners, executives, and professionals. She enjoys transforming their lives, careers, and mindsets through the power of radical self-discovery, self-care, and self-love. “I also love the opportunity to honor my Afro-Indigenous heritage with Goddess Wraps by Jensine.”      Jensine emphasizes that external success cannot exist without internal success, and when she reflects on the fear, anger, and grief that consumed her at the beginning of her journey, she's overwhelmed with joy. “I cherish and appreciate the peace, prosperity, and stability my family knows now. I am also humbled by the blessings God placed in my life,” she said.      Jensine thanks the members of her community for their constant support. She also thanks her mother for always breathing life into her vision. “Thank you, Mom, for being the wind beneath my wings!”  Her advice to others who may follow in her footsteps is simple. “Life will never be without trials and tribulations, but we are strong, creative, and gifted enough to turn those trials and tribulations into something more. Whether it takes a year, a decade, or multiple decades, you can transform your life. You have everything you need within you to start and succeed.”      The future looks very bright for this savvy businesswoman. Jensine's businesses and brands are growing, and soon she will launch a new men's line at the beginning of 2024. To learn more about The Source Unlimited LLC, please visit their website at www.source864.com   To learn more about Huami Magazine, please visit our website at www.huamimagazine.com  You may also follow us on Facebook and Instagram by putting Huami Magazine in your searchbox.  T

Join us in this inspiring episode as we delve into the captivating journey of Kateryna Sytnyk, a remarkable figure who redefined success in the tech industry. From her background in applied math to her dynamic roles as a Database Administrator, CEO, CTO, and more, Kateryna's career path showcases the limitless potential within the tech realm. Discover the power of embracing diverse skills, defying traditional career paths, and seeking collaborative opportunities. Tune in to uncover how her story will ignite your own creative aspirations and reshape your perspective on success in the world of technology. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/aarna-sahu/support

On today's podcast Suzanne Papp chats about: • Her circuitous path from student to employee at UC San Diego • The role of a Database Administrator, automating DBA functions and SNOW ticket advice • Looking forward to attending the Splunk .conf23 • Taking up drawing, dropping the recorder and boogie boarding Transcript w/ timestamps: https://bit.ly/3X76jE1

As data infrastructure gets more complex, clarity is more important than ever. Our guest Blythe Morrow talks with hosts Sean Sebring and Ashley Adams about the importance of communication for Data pros, and how to speak so that people will listen.    © 2023 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved 

Is your database a junk drawer? Is it more like a black hole? If you're afraid to look in there, join TechPod hosts Ashley Adams and Sean Sebring as they demystify Database with the help of Head Geek and resident Database expert Thomas LaRock. This episode will discuss the challenges database administrators face, and the tools they can use to address them.  © 2023 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved 

Episode 2 continues our deep dive into data management, but this time with a twist.  Moser Senior Consultant Tope Akinmoladun joins us to talk to us about a day in the life of a data manager-as-a-service consultant.   Tope joined Moser as a Database Administrator in 2022 and is now a SQL Server Administrator. He's worked in different industries like telecommunications, utilities, and gaming.   His expertise is in SQL Server Administration ranging from monitoring user access and security, upgrades and migration, and performance tuning.  Outside of work, Tope enjoys spending time with family and friends, soccer, playing video games, and listening to Afro-beats music.

Josephine Bush said about her work and answered some of my questions. Connect me at https://www.SmartCherrysThoughts.com

Array Cast - December 9, 2022 Show NotesThanks to Bob Therriault, Adám Brudzewsky, Stephen Taylor and Nick Psaris for gathering these links:[01] 00:01:50 APLNAATOT podcast #4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxSd2Hma_Ro&list=PLYKQVqyrAEj8Q7BdOgakZCAGf6ReO1cue Naming the APLNAATOT podcast twitter https://twitter.com/a_brudz/status/1600523637253185541[02] 00:03:44 Advent of Code (AOC) Links BQN Solutions https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/community/aoc.html APL Wiki Advent of Code: https://apl.wiki/aoc K Wiki Advent of Code: https://k.miraheze.org/wiki/Advent_of_Code[03] 00:04:40 q AOC list http://github.com/qbists/studyq/[04] 00:06:20 Parsing the input for AOC in APL video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHoiROI15BA Jay Foad's solution to day 6 https://github.com/jayfoad/aoc2022apl[05] 00:07:45 Nick Psaris episodes of the ArrayCast https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode-02-challenges-facing-the-array-languages https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode-03-what-is-an-array https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode-04-responding-to-listeners-email Q tips https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25221469-q-tips Vector review of Q tips https://vector.org.uk/book-review-q-tips-fast-scalable-and-maintainable-kdb-2/ Fun Q https://www.amazon.com/dp/1734467509 Vector review of Fun Q https://vector.org.uk/book-review-fun-q-a-functional-introduction-to-machine-learning-in-q/[06] 00:09:33 Atar1 800 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_8-bit_family[07] 00:10:09 Morgan Stanley https://www.morganstanley.com/ Perl Computer Language https://www.perl.org/ Hash Map https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/differences-between-hashmap-and-hashtable-in-java/amp/ VBA Computer Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_for_Applications Java Computer Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language) C++ Computer Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B STL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B#Standard_library Bit representation: https://code.kx.com/q/ref/vs/#encode[08] 00:14:23 kdb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kdb%2B[09] 00:15:08 Abridged introduction to kdb+ https://legaldocumentation.kx.com/q/d/kdb+.htm Arthur Whitney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Whitney_(computer_scientist) Abridged introduction to q https://legaldocumentation.kx.com/q/d/q.htm kx archive https://code.kx.com/q/learn/archive/#archive Joins - https://code.kx.com/q/basics/joins/[10] 00:23:39 vs operator in q https://code.kx.com/q/ref/vs/[11] 00:24:50 sv operator in q https://code.kx.com/q/ref/sv/[12] 00:26:08 k6 Computer Language oK https://johnearnest.github.io/ok/index.html[13] 00:27:10 kx systems https://kx.com/[14] 00:31:48 Shakti https://shakti.com/ Arthur Whitney Articles ACMqueue B. Cantrill https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242 kx interview https://web.archive.org/web/20150725231802/https://kx.com/arthur-interview.php[15] 00:32:20 Roger Hui https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Roger_Hui Roger Hui Memorial Episode of ArrayCast https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode13-roger-hui Ken Iverson https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Ken_Iverson[16] 00:34:45 Max and Min overloaded in k https://kparc.com/k.txt[17] 00:35:40 Where operator overloads Q https://code.kx.com/q/ref/where/#vector-of-non-negative-integers APL https://apl.wiki/Where BQN https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/doc/replicate.html#indices J https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Vocabulary/icapdot[18] 00:39:23 Day 6 AOC 2022 https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/6 Coding by successive approximation Romilly Cocking https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode34-romilly-cocking[19] 00:41:29 Emacs https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/[20] 00:43:28 Iversonian or Array Language episode https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode39-iverson-or-array-language[21] 00:45:10 APL Computer Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)[22] 00:48:00 Q lists of lists https://code.kx.com/q4m3/3_Lists/#37-nesting[23] 00:50:25 SQL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL[24] 00:54:08 JD: https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Jd/Overview DDB: https://dfns.dyalog.com/ddb_index.htm SQAPL: https://www.dyalog.com/uploads/documents/Dyalog_SQAPL_Server_Data_Sheet.pdf[25] 00:56:42 Joins https://code.kx.com/q/basics/joins/[26] 00:59:20 Q Dictionary https://code.kx.com/q/basics/dictsandtables/[27] 00:59:46 Combinators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatory_logic[28] 01:00:14 Multidimensional arrays in SQL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#Standardization_history[29] 01:02:07 Database Administrator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_administrator Database Analyst - Quant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_analysis_(finance)[30] 01:04:21 kx User version of q https://kx.com/kdb-personal-edition-download/[31] 01:04:32 Python Computer Language https://www.python.org/ Pyq https://kx.com/blog/using-the-nag-library-for-python-with-kdb-and-pyq/ PyKX https://kx.com/videos/an-introduction-to-pykx/[32] 01:07:12 John Earnest https://beyondloom.com/about/index.html John Earnest ArrayCast Episode https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode41-john-earnest[33] 01:07:45 Numpy https://numpy.org/ R Computer Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language) Pandas https://pandas.pydata.org/[34] 01:10:55 CMU Grad Course https://www.cmu.edu/mscf/academics/curriculum/46982-market-microstructure-and-algorithmic-trading.html[35] 01:14:42 Matlab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATLAB[36] 01:16:05 k nearest neighbours algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-nearest_neighbors_algorithm[37] 01:18:00 Q for Mortals https://code.kx.com/q4m3[38] 01:19:30 How to speed up Pandas Code by 100x? https://medium.com/geekculture/simple-tricks-to-speed-up-pandas-by-100x-3b7e705783a8[39] 01:22:30 contact AT ArrayCast DOT COM[40] 01:24:21 Old Master q https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Master_Q

Mr. Yinka Ogunleye (Yinka) is an adept and passionate leader in Strategy and Planning with over two (2) decades of experience; dedicated to driving innovation and results across multi-company structured organizations in the Energy, Oil and Gas industry. He has proven ability with broad exposures to manage strategy and planning processes, nurture the growth of business through development of company objectives, targets and performance aspirations. He has exposures covering Oil Exploration, Oil Production and Gas Businesses in the upstream and midstream sectors.   He started his career as a Database Administrator, Financial Systems with Pan Ocean Oil Corporation Nigeria Limited. His career had since traversed Information Technology, Business Development, Technical and Commercial functions. He had the coordinating role of Strategy Development across six (6) business arms of a Group, spanning upstream Oil and Gas, Energy development, Pipeline, Gas Processing and Monetization. He joined Amazon Energy Group in 2020 as Vice President New Ventures, and Group Head Strategy and Planning. In these roles he was among several functions coordinating the Strategy and Planning programs and initiatives for incubating projects through creative commercial arrangements; developing new business opportunities and partnerships; and superintending over the Group's corporate strategy, planning and performance program. Yinka holds a Bachelor's degree in Zoology and a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the Lagos State University, Ojo. He obtained a Post-Graduate Diploma in Information Technology at the Federal University of Technology, Akure. He also obtained an MBA from the Lagos Business School, and was on exchange program to the IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain where he earned a certificate in Entrepreneurship and Competitive Strategy. He is a certified Project Management Practitioner, Balance Scorecard Professional and Performance Management Practitioner. He has been doing his Doctoral studies where he is currently researching on Innovation and Responsible Leadership at the Gordon's Institute of Business Science, South Africa. He holds a Certificate Business Analytics at the Harvard Business School. Yinka is an entrepreneur. He is the founder of a start-up called Riba-x(www.riba-x.com), a Search, Connect and Communities platform for small businesses and communities of shared interests. He also runs AtriumData Solutions and Services Limited, a Strategy and Project Consulting company Yinka is also currently into Agri-business, where he is developing a Palm Oil plantation and Pig Farm. Key Takeaways   1. You can still reach your end-goal even if you're traveling a different path - Yinka was always passionate about IT growing up. He had a computer scientist father and learned coding languages like C++ and worked with databases. He wanted to pursue a degree in Computer Science but unfortunately, didn't make the cut. Yinka instead pursued a degree in Zoology yet he still managed to land a IT role post-graduation. 2. Don't be afraid to branch out - After learning Zoology, specializing in genetics and working various roles in the IT field, Yinka went to pursue an MBA in Business and tackled his entrepreneur side. Exploring your interests and diversifying your knowledge is a great way to live a fulfilling life.  3. Mentor and mentee relationships can have different forms - For Yinka, the mentor-mentee dynamic involved his mentor asking questions and probing his (the mentee's) thoughts rather than providing advice directly. This pushed Yinka to either mull over his mentor's prompts or provide an answer to his mentor's questions, causing him to engage in deep thinking. Today, Yinka and his mentor are as close as brothers.  4. Entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey - Entrepreneurship can be extremely gratifying but it also comes with its ups and downs. Yinka founded “Dago” with his good friend, now turned business partner. Unfortunately, the company hit a brick wall and the business relationship between Yinka and his friend fell apart. Today, Yinka repackaged the idea of Dago and turned it into a new project called “Riba-x.”   5. Ensure you derive pleasure from what you do - Whether it's through your job, hobbies or relationships, make sure that what you are investing in brings you joy. If you pursue things that you derive pleasure from, you're more likely to feel content with it despite any drawbacks. Applying this to a career, if you are doing something you love every single day, eventually money comes second to your happiness. SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST HERE: APPLE PODCASTS GOOGLE PODCASTS SPOTIFY LIBSYN YOUTUBE   OKIKI RESOURCES: Need Video Content or Personal Brand Photos? Book Here Join the Okiki Video Content Bootcamp Today! https://www.okikiconsulting.com/okiki-video-bootcamp   ABOUT FIYIN: Fiyin Obayan is the founder of Okiki Consulting, where she helps business owners communicate their personal brand or company brand stories through video content, in order to communicate to their target audience. Contact Fiyin: Website: www.okikiconsulting.com Email: info@okikiconsulting.com Phone: (306)716-0324 Instagram: @Okikiconsulting and @Okikiconsultingmedia Facebook: @Okikiconsulting LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fiyinfoluwaobayan/ Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/okiki

https://go.dok.community/slack https://dok.community With: Vijay Anand Ramakrishnan - Database Administrator, ChistaDATA Bart Farrell - Head of Community, Data on Kubernetes Community ABSTRACT OF THE TALK This talk concerns performing analytical tasks with Apache Superset with ClickHouse as the data backend. ClickHouse is a super fast database for analytical tasks, and Apache Superset is an Apache Software foundation project meant for data visualization and exploration. Performing analytical tasks using this combo is super fast since both the software are designed to be scalable and capable of handling data of petabyte scale. BIO Vijay Anand is based out of Chennai (India), working as a Database Administrator in ChistaDATA. He has extensive experience in ClickHouse, Python and has contributed as a technical lead in multiple organizations building ClickHouse based solutions. His areas of interest include database design, building software solutions using open source technologies. He is the author of a book on ClickHouse titled "Up and Running with ClickHouse". KEY TAKE-AWAYS Real time analytics, Data exploration and Visualization

Is there an antidote to toxic positivity? Does having a positive attitude really help during difficult situations? How can workplace positivity foster pandemic resilience? In this episode, IT Professional and Data Administrator John Sundar shared how he juggled his personal life and work during the pandemic and how he has influenced his team and colleagues to be progressively motivated and energized despite many challenges. He also discussed the ways to keep a positive attitude at work and how it affects productivity and efficiency. Further, he highlighted the importance of maintaining an optimistic outlook in life and the benefits of encouraging and affirming others in order to create an atmosphere of creativity, camaraderie, and enthusiasm producing great impacts. Tune in and get ready for this encouraging and inspiring episode. See you in the WAR ROOM! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/the-war-room-podcast-desk/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/the-war-room-podcast-desk/support

When I was starting my career, I expected to be a programmer. That's what people who wrote the software were called. At some point they adopted "developer" instead, shunning the programmer label. Now I see software engineers has replaced developer in many organizations. I'm not sure the job is much different than it was in 1990, other than the specific technologies used. The DBA used to do a lot of system administration-type work on database instances. Check logs, set security, run backups, and maybe look at some queries. However, in many cases, their work was limited to things running inside the database software, or the database software itself (patches, related configuration for the host OS, etc.). I saw recently that DBAs have started to adopt the data (or database) engineer label as a new job title. Presumably, this pays more because, well, it sounds like it should. Data Professional sounds more comprehensive and skilled than Database Administrator. Database Engineer sounds better than both. Read the rest of DBA to Data Engineer

Mike, Seth, & Tommy discuss the following article and if a Database Administrator is still a required role on its own, or if the DBA is merging with other skillsets in the world of Power BI. https://medium.com/@fpatano/architecting-for-performance-on-databricks-sql-6a02c0539ab1 Get in touch: Send in your questions or topics you want us to discuss by tweeting to @PowerBITips with the hashtag #empMailbag or submit on the PowerBI.tips Podcast Page. Visit PowerBI.tips: https://powerbi.tips/ Watch the episodes live every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 730am CST on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/powerbitips Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/230fp78XmHHRXTiYICRLVv Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/explicit-measures-podcast/id1568944083‎ Follow Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcarlo/ Follow Seth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seth-bauer/ Follow Tommy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommypuglia/

Internal Auditors are like detectives. They search for clues that will guide them to finding issues within an organisation. Whether it's with the organisation's risks, operational effectiveness, or compliance with laws and regulations And like any good detective - at least, like the ones in TV shows - they need their trusty magnifying glass to spot all these little clues that others wouldn't notice! Now, that magnifying glass represents data analytics. With that data analytics in hand, Internal Auditors are changing the way they work. Meet Peter McLeod Peter's Role as an Information Leader at the University of Southern Queensland Peter McLeod is a Director of Assurance Services at the University of Southern Queensland, where he oversees Risk, Compliance, and Internal Audit functions. The University of Southern Queensland is a regional University dedicated to providing quality degrees and programs in a flexible and supportive environment. In just over 50 years, the University of Southern Queensland has become a prominent teaching and research institution providing education worldwide from three Southern Queensland locations. For 3 years in a row, the university has been ranked No. 1 in Australia for graduate starting salary, and almost 80% of our students gain full-time employment on completing their degree. Peter's Other Work in Information and IT Before becoming the University of Southern Queensland's Director of Assurance Services, Peter took on the role of Associate Director of Finance, developing a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Strategy and deploying it within the university's Financial Services. Earlier on in his career with the university, Peter also took on the role of Project Manager of Travel Systems & Functional Analyst. Previously, Peter has also been the Software Development Management Consultant of Ambush Security Systems, as well as the Manager of Strategic Projects and the Database Administrator & Release Co-ordinator at Practical Computer Services. Over the past 15 years, Peter has published numerous articles on the topics of Technology and Innovation. Internal Audits, Data Analytics, and Innovation In this exclusive analytics podcast episode, Peter shares: Accidentally becoming an Internal Auditor Encouraging Internal Auditors to get their name out there His role as the Director of Assurance Services at the University of Southern Queensland How risk and compliance come into play in his work What his work means for data and analytics professionals Whether more and more people are shifting to using data in internal auditing Advice for internal auditors in other universities in starting to use data analytics How Robotic Process Automation and data analytics changes the way his team works How he empowers his team to perform the functions using data analytics The risk if a functional team is not leveraging emerging technologies Encouraging innovation when a team is seen as a functional team rather than an R&D team His advice for other functional team leaders looking to encourage their teams to improve their work through the use of data analytics If you are a functional team leader looking to encourage your team to improve their work through the use of data analytics, this is the episode you do not want to miss out on. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/analyticsshow/message

2022-03-08 Weekly News - Episode 138Watch the video version on YouTube at https://youtu.be/DO6_4ccmyVg Hosts: Luis Majano- CEO of Ortus SolutionsGavin Pickin - Senior Developer for Ortus SolutionsThanks to our Sponsor - Ortus SolutionsThe makers of ColdBox, CommandBox, ForgeBox, TestBox and almost every other Box out there. A few ways  to say thanks back to Ortus Solutions: Like and subscribe to our videos on YouTube.  Help ORTUS reach for the Stars - Star and Fork our Repos https://github.com/coldbox/coldbox-platform https://github.com/Ortus-Solutions/ContentBox/ https://github.com/Ortus-Solutions/commandbox/ https://github.com/ortus-solutions/docker-commandbox https://github.com/Ortus-Solutions/testbox/ https://github.com/coldbox-modules/qb/ https://github.com/coldbox-modules/quick/ https://github.com/coldbox-modules/cbwire https://github.com/Ortus-Solutions/DocBox Star all of your Github Box Dependencies from CommandBox with https://www.forgebox.io/view/commandbox-github  Subscribe to our Podcast on your Podcast Apps and leave us a review Sign up for a free or paid account on CFCasts, which is releasing new content every week Buy Ortus's Book - 102 ColdBox HMVC Quick Tips and Tricks on GumRoad (http://gum.co/coldbox-tips)  Patreon SupportWe have 36 patreons providing 96% of the funding for our Modernize or Die Podcasts via our Patreon site: https://www.patreon.com/ortussolutions. Modernize SpotlightAwesome shoutout to Ortus in the Boxteam Slack from Don BallamyShoutout to the Ortus team!  A few weeks ago we had a major security incident on our network at Azure (not CF related) that caused us to rebuild our entire network of virtual machines.  We hired a security firm to oversee the rebuild and one of our legacy API apps running on CF 11 was flagged and had to be upgraded to CF 2021 (we had planned to, but time had been limiting it).  I spent a few days trying, this app was originally written in ColdFusion 8, but then gave up and decided to rewrite the entire API application using ColdBox 6.  I was able to rebuild the entire application in 3 days.  Without the tools you guys create and work on a daily basis, this would not have been possible.  Thank You!https://boxteam.slack.com/archives/C0532LKQ3/p1646535163494699 News and EventsBuilt with ColdFusion CFMLThis repo is a community repo to list and showcase companies, sites and technologies powered by ColdFusion (CFML) and several Ortus Products.To contribute, fork and star the project. Then add your own organization file in the orgs directory and then append the name of that file ( excluding the extension ), in to the cfml-rocks.json array of orgs. You may use the schema below for reference. Send us your pull request and once validated, we will add it to the repo and site.https://github.com/Ortus-Solutions/built-with-cfml-box/CFML Spreadsheet v3.4.0 releasedSpreadsheet-CFML 3.4.0 released with a new sheetInfo() method to return properties of a specific sheet within your workbook https://github.com/cfsimplicity/spreadsheet-cfml Ortus Webinar - March - ForgeBoxication with Gavin PickinMarch 25th, 2022 Time: 11:00 AM Central Time (US and Canada)ForgeBox is CFML's package management system, and in this webinar you will learn how you can use it with any cfml app you have. You'll learn how to use ForgeBox packaged in your app, commit your own code to ForgeBox, and if we have time we might even make your code into a ColdBox module.Register today: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwkduGurDgoHNf4sljBngAFLpoNSNLkzom3 More Webinars: https://www.ortussolutions.com/events/webinars Hawaii CFUG User Group - Moving your Legacy ColdFusion application to Modern CFML with Mark TakataMarch 24th, 20221:00pm Hawaiian TimeWe've all seen old legacy code in our ColdFusion applications.How do you move that legacy code to modern CFML with easier maintenance and deployment, fewer bugs, and streamlined code?Why Move to Modern CFMLMost of us understand that moving our legacy applications to modern CFML is smart. Easier Maintenance Rapid Deployment Fewer Bugs Modern, Responsive Front-End https://hawaiicoldfusionusergroup.adobeconnect.com/legacy/ Happy Birthday Docker - Docker Community All HandsThursday, March 31, 2022 | 8:00am - 11:00am PTJoin us in celebrating Docker's 9th birthday at our next Community All Hands! This virtual event is a unique opportunity for the community to come together with Docker staff to learn, share and collaborate about all things Docker.https://www.docker.com/event-community-all-hands Adobe WorkshopsJoin the Adobe ColdFusion Workshop to learn how you and your agency can leverage ColdFusion to create amazing web content. This one-day training will cover all facets of Adobe ColdFusion that developers need to build applications that can run across multiple cloud providers or on-premiseWEDNESDAY, MARCH 9, 20229:00 AM CETDamien Bruyndonckx https://workshop-cf-adobe.meetus.adobeevents.com/ THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 20229:00 AM CESTDamien Bruyndonckxhttps://adobe-workshop-coldfusion.meetus.adobeevents.com/ FREE :)Full list - https://meetus.adobeevents.com/coldfusion/ CFCasts Content Updateshttps://www.cfcasts.com Just ReleasedBrad Wood on CommandBox 5.x. https://www.cfcasts.com/series/ortus-webinars-2022/videos/brad-wood-on-commandbox-5.x. Conferences and TrainingDocker Community All HandsThursday, March 31, 2022 | 8:00am - 11:00am PTJoin us in celebrating Docker's 9th birthday at our next Community All Hands! This virtual event is a unique opportunity for the community to come together with Docker staff to learn, share and collaborate about all things Docker.https://www.docker.com/event-community-all-hands  DevNexus 2022 - The largest Java conference in the USApril 12-14, 2022Atlanta, GABrad & Luis will be speakingLuis - Alpine.js: Declare and React with SimplicityBrad - What's a Pull Request? (Contributing to Open Source)https://devnexus.com/DockerConMay 10, 2022Free Online Virtual ConferenceDockerCon will be a free, immersive online experience complete with Docker product demos , breakout sessions, deep technical sessions from Docker and our partners, Docker experts, Docker Captains, our community and luminaries from across the industry and much more. Don't miss your chance to gather and connect with colleagues from around the world at the largest developer conference of the year. Sign up to pre-register for DockerCon 2022!https://www.docker.com/dockercon/ US VueJS ConfFORT LAUDERDALE, FL • JUNE 8-10, 2022Beach. Code. Vue.Workshop day: June 8Main Conference: June 9-10https://us.vuejs.org/ Into The Box 2022 - Tentative dates - September 27-30Into the Box Latam 2022 - Tentative dates - Dec 1-2CF Summit - Still waiting on news from Adobe.More conferencesNeed more conferences, this site has a huge list of conferences for almost any language/community.https://confs.tech/Blogs, Tweets, and Videos of the Week3/8/22 - Blog - Ben Nadel - Using Common Table Expressions (CTE) To Create Derived Tables In MySQL 8Now that my ColdFusion blog is running on MySQL 8.0.28, I get to leverage a number of new features related to derived tables. Yesterday, I looked as using LATERAL derived tables to gather row-specific data. This morning, I want to look at using something called Common Table Expressions (CTE) in order to create derived tables that are factored-out of the main SQL query and placed within a named, temporary result set. This doesn't change the derived table, functionally speaking; but, I believe it does make the SQL query easier to read.https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4223-using-common-table-expressions-cte-to-create-derived-tables-in-mysql-8.htm 3/7/22 - Charlie Arehart - FusionReactor 8.7.7 released, enhances the recent DB and API Time featureI had blogged in early November about how FusionReactor 8.7.4 had added at that time a new feature where it lists on request summary pages the DB and API Time of each request, so you could readily tell how much of a request's duration might have been caused by time spent waiting for either of those kinds of resources.Now in 8.7.7, which was released last week (Mar 1), the benefit of that feature has been extended so that a) the same information is written to both the FusionReactor request logs and b) it's also now available in FR crash protection alert emails. In this post, I'll show you examples of what's changed for each, and I'll note another related changes in the prior FR update, 8.7.6.https://www.carehart.org/blog/client/index.cfm/2022/3/7/fusionreactor_8_7_7_enhances_db_and_api_time_feature 3/6/22 - Tweet - John Barret - University of Hawaii using CFLM in 2005How the University of Hawaii used to use #ColdFusion in ICS 415, a class I took way back in 2005. http://nordbotten.com/articles/ColdFusion.pdf https://twitter.com/johnny_barrett/status/1500677296499269633https://twitter.com/johnny_barrett3/5/22 - Blog - Ben Nadel - Tracking Database Schema And Schema Migrations In Git Version ControlA decade ago, I attended a presentation from Tim Cunningham titled "Version Control on the Database: the Final Frontier". At the time, I was relatively new to version control. At InVision, we had just started using git and GitHub; and, before that, I had only dabbled briefly with SVN (Subversion). I was still struggling to wrap my head around branching and merging and rebasing. So, when Tim suggested that we should also be storing our "database" in version control, I simply wasn't ready to hear it. I mean, it sounded awesome; but, due to my lack of experience, I couldn't connect - at a practical level - with anything he was saying. Cut to 2022 and I can't imagine not tracking our database schema and schema migrations in version control!https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4221-tracking-database-schema-and-schema-migrations-in-git-version-control.htm 3/4/22 - Blog - Ben Nadel - Moving MySQL To A Per-Application Datasource In ColdFusion 2021Over the weekend, after my ColdFusion blog was accidentally upgraded from MySQL 5.0.10 to 8.0.28, I had to scurry and update the datasource configuration in both my production environment as well as in my local Docker development environment. And it occurred to me that manually updating the MySQL datasource in the ColdFusion Administrator represented a huge point of human failure. And, more than that, there was no record of these changes being made; which meant that undoing said changes would be quite challenging. In a modern application context, this is highly disturbing! My application's datasource configuration workflow should be in source-control. As such, I've decided to move my blog to a per-Application datasource.https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4220-moving-mysql-to-a-per-application-datasource-in-coldfusion-2021.htm 3/4/22 - Blog - Mark Takata - Adobe - Trying out Redis for ColdFusion cachingI had a customer reach out to me last week about moving their session storage to Redis, so I decided to play around a bit with it. I'd never really had the need to utilize Redis or any of the other caches, as the companies I'd worked with used the local CF cache or other solutions. So I saw this as an opportunity to play and learn.https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2022/03/trying-redis-coldfusion-caching/ 3/4/22 - Blog - Nolan Erck - South of Shasta - Why Do Some CFML Jobs Require Degrees?Earlier today in the ColdFusion Programmers forum on Facebook somebody asked (I'm paraphrasing a little) why do some ColdFusion jobs require a Computer Science degree when they don't teach CFML in college?I have 2 answers:1 - Actually, there is (or was?) a ColdFusion curriculum written up and made available for colleges that want to teach ColdFusion in the classroom. I'm unclear on the current status of this, but my guess is someone on the Adobe ColdFusion team would have more info (Mark or Kishore probably).2 - The longer answer is, because good Computer Science degrees are not language specific. Good degrees (and good software developers) focus on constructs, concepts, and higher level skills. They don't spend (much) time worrying about the difference between a CFInclude and a Custom Tag...but they do teach you why a programming construct that leaks data (CFInclude) would be less appropriate in most situations than one that promotes better programming practices (CFFunction, CFCs, and even Custom Tags are better than CFInclude in that regard).https://southofshasta.com/blog/why-do-some-cfml-jobs-require-degrees/ 3/3/22 - Tweet - Brad Wood - Ortus Solutions - CFML Queries have member functions like arrays and structsThis came up today-- you may not realize CFML queries have the same each(), map(), reduce(), filter() member functions as arrays and structs. Your closure receives a struct representing each query row. Super easy to use for manipulating queries. https://twitter.com/bdw429s/status/1499534951699603456 https://twitter.com/bdw429s 3/2/22 - Blog - Brad Wood - Ortus Solutions - CommandBox/Undertow Server scanned with OWASP ZAPWe had a user ask recently if we had run any automated scanners against CommandBox servers to verify they were secure. While we've taken care to make CommandBox servers secure by default and I've helped many clients who have run scans against their own CommandBox-hosted apps, Ortus had never performed any scans just against CommandBox itself. I grabbed the OWASP ZAP scanner 4, which is a free scanning tool that checks for a bunch of different vulnerabilities, specifically HTTP header related. I figured it would be nice to post what I did here for the community to see.https://community.ortussolutions.com/t/commandbox-undertow-server-scanned-with-owasp-zap/9134 3/2/22 - Tweet - Brad Wood - Ortus Solutions - SQL Server MonitorI've tossed the (very old) code for a little CF tool/site I wrote years ago to visually monitor all the running process on a SQL Server (ONTO GITHUB).  It's handy for finding processes with locks blocking other processes.  It's rough, but works. Feel free to play: https://github.com/bdw429s/SQL-Server-Monitor https://twitter.com/bdw429s/status/1498812367605538816https://twitter.com/bdw429s CFML JobsSeveral positions available on https://www.getcfmljobs.com/Listing over 54 ColdFusion positions from 33 companies across 32 locations in 5 Countries.6 new jobs listedFull-Time - ColdFusion programmer at Washington, DC - United States Mar 08https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/united-states/ColdFusion-programmer-at-Washington-DC/11441Full-Time - Full Stack Developer (Remote) at Sacramento, CA - United States Mar 07https://www.getcfmljobs.com/viewjob.cfm?jobid=11440Full-Time - Coldfusion Developer at Connecticut - United States Mar 05https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/united-states/Coldfusion-Developer-at-Connecticut/11438Full-Time - IT Web Developer at Everett - United States Mar 04https://www.getcfmljobs.com/viewjob.cfm?jobid=11437 Full-Time - Senior ColdFusion Developer - GeoNorth Information Systems a.. - United States Mar 02https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/united-states/Senior-ColdFusion-Developer-GeoNorth-Information-Systems-at-Alaska/11435Full-Time - Database Administrator with ColdFusion at Remote - United States Mar 02https://www.getcfmljobs.com/jobs/index.cfm/united-states/Database-Administrator-with-ColdFusion-at-Remote/11436 Other Job LinksOrtus Solutionshttps://www.ortussolutions.com/about-us/careers Everett Community Collegehttps://employment.everettcc.edu/postings/5300 The Consortium, Inchttps://jobs.crelate.com/portal/consortium/job/ok4b6rcj95g1rhscawespxcdjy ForgeBox Module of the WeekSentry by Ortus SolutionsThis module connects your CFML application to send bug reports to Sentry (https://sentry.io)If your app uses neither ColdBox nor LogBox, you can still instantiate the SentryService and use it directly so long as you prep it with the settings it needs.Methods include captureMessage, captureException, capture… with the ability to use levels, tags, auto pass cgi variables, and much more. Great free tier options for getting started with smaller apps. https://www.forgebox.io/view/sentry VS Code Hint Tips and Tricks of the WeekFile Nesting in VS CodeVS Code v1.64 was released a few days ago and it's once again packaged with nice new features and improvements. An exciting new feature is the Side Panel that can be opened opposite to the Side Bar, i.e. the “other side of the screen”, giving you the option to have more views open at once. I can see how that can be useful on bigger screens.Another new feature that catched my interest was the experimental support for file nesting. This feature lets you visually “nest”/group related files under a “root” file in the same directory. For example, say you have a main.ts file and next to it you have main.js, main.d.ts and main.js.map. After enabling the file nesting feature and configuring it, VS Code will visually group the main.* files under the main.ts filehttps://dzhavat.github.io/2022/02/07/file-nesting-in-vs-code.html Thank you to all of our Patreon SupportersThese individuals are personally supporting our open source initiatives to ensure the great toolings like CommandBox, ForgeBox, ColdBox,  ContentBox, TestBox and all the other boxes keep getting the continuous development they need, and funds the cloud infrastructure at our community relies on like ForgeBox for our Package Management with CommandBox. You can support us on Patreon here https://www.patreon.com/ortussolutionsDon't forget, we have Annual Memberships, pay for the year and save 10% - great for businesses. Bronze Packages and up, now get a ForgeBox Pro and CFCasts subscriptions as a perk for their Patreon Subscription. All Patreon supporters have a Profile badge on the Community Website All Patreon supporters have their own Private Forum access on the Community Website https://community.ortussolutions.com/ PatreonsJohn Wilson - Synaptrix Eric HoffmanGary KnightMario RodriguesGiancarlo GomezDavid Belanger  (Bell-an-jer)Dan CardJonathan PerretJeffry McGee - Sunstar Media6Dean MaunderJoseph Lamoree  (Lah-more-ee)?Don BellamyJan Jannek  (Yan Yannek)Laksma Tirtohadi  (Lah-ksma Turt-o-hah-dee)Carl Von StettenJeremy AdamsDidier LesnickiMatthew ClementeDaniel GarciaScott Steinbeck - Agri Tracking SystemsBen NadelBrett DeLineKai KoenigCharlie ArehartJonas ErikssonJason DaigerShawn OdenMatthew DarbyRoss PhillipsEdgardo CabezasPatrick FlynnStephany Monge  (Mongee)John WhishKevin WrightPeter AmiriYou can see an up to date list of all sponsors on Ortus Solutions' Websitehttps://ortussolutions.com/about-us/sponsors ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Dr. Lamya Abdulaziz AlOmair, Ph.D. is the Head of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and Bioinformatics, at King Abdullah International Medical Research Center (https://kaimrc.ksau-hs.edu.sa/), and an affiliated faculty member in the systems biology group at George Mason University. Dr. AlOmair is one of the first Saudi women to obtain a Bachelor Degree in Computer Science, from King Saud University, following which she joined the Saudi National Guard Health Affairs (NGHA) initially as a Programmer and Database Specialist, and was later promoted to Database Administrator and Manager of Human Resource Management System, working on trending topics such as Big Data, and related initiatives and projects. She then decided to further her career in the newly emerging field of Health Informatics when she obtained a Master degree in Health Informatics from King Saud Bin Abdul-Aziz University for Health Sciences in 2007. Dr. AlOmair then applied her skills to many I.T. projects at the NGHA and even participated in a few national initiatives in the field of Health Informatics. Her initiatives lead her towards more advanced field of computational Bioinformatics. At this point she decided to focus more on this promising new field. In 2017, Dr. AlOmair earned her PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from George Mason University, USA. In recent years, Dr. AlOmair has been examining the rapidly evolving field of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), exploring its current and potential applications in healthcare sectors. She organized, with passion, a successful A.I. & Bioinformatics symposium in April 2021 to increase awareness and improve skill in AI among young professionals. Dr. AlOmair is an active supporter and enabler in the fields of both A.I. and Big Data, and regularly utilizes her exposure to healthcare officials and healthcare projects, both locally and internationally, to promote their advancements and implementations.

About SeanSean is a senior software engineer at TheZebra, working to build developer experience tooling with a focus on application stability and scalability. Over the past seven years, they have helped create software and proprietary platforms that help teams understand and better their own work.Links: TheZebra: https://www.thezebra.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/sc_codeUM LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-corbett-574a5321/ Email: scorbett@thezebra.com TranscriptSean: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Today's episode is brought to you in part by our friends at MinIO the high-performance Kubernetes native object store that's built for the multi-cloud, creating a consistent data storage layer for your public cloud instances, your private cloud instances, and even your edge instances, depending upon what the heck you're defining those as, which depends probably on where you work. It's getting that unified is one of the greatest challenges facing developers and architects today. It requires S3 compatibility, enterprise-grade security and resiliency, the speed to run any workload, and the footprint to run anywhere, and that's exactly what MinIO offers. With superb read speeds in excess of 360 gigs and 100 megabyte binary that doesn't eat all the data you've gotten on the system, it's exactly what you've been looking for. Check it out today at min.io/download, and see for yourself. That's min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig is the solution for securing DevOps. They have a blog post that went up recently about how an insecure AWS Lambda function could be used as a pivot point to get access into your environment. They've also gone deep in-depth with a bunch of other approaches to how DevOps and security are inextricably linked. To learn more, visit sysdig.com and tell them I sent you. That's S-Y-S-D-I-G dot com. My thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. An awful lot of companies out they're calling themselves unicorns, which is odd because if you look at the root ‘uni,' it means one, but they're sure a lot of them out there. Conversely, my guest today works at a company called TheZebra with the singular definite article being the key differentiator here, and frankly, I'm a big fan of being that specific. My guest is Senior Software Development Engineer in Test, Sean Corbett. Sean, thank you for taking the time to join me today, and more or less suffer the slings and arrows, I will no doubt be hurling your direction.Sean: Thank you very much for having me here.Corey: So, you've been a great Twitter follow for a while: You're clearly deeply technically skilled; you also have a soul, you're strong on the empathy point, and that is an embarrassing lack in large swaths of our industry. I'm going to talk about that right now because I'm sure it comes through the way it does when you talk about virtually anything else. Instead, you are a Software Development Engineer in Test or SDET. I believe you are the only person I'm aware of in my orbit who uses that title, so I have to ask—and please don't view this as me in any way criticizing you; it's mostly my own ignorance speaking—what is that?Sean: So, what is a Software Development Engineer in Test? If you look back—I believe it was Microsoft originally came up with the title, and what it stems from was they needed software development engineers who particularly specialized in creating automation frameworks for testing stuff at scale. And that was over a decade ago, I believe. Microsoft has since stopped using the term, but it persists in areas in the industry.And what is an SDET today? Well, I think we're going to find out it's a strange mixture of things. SDET today is not just someone that creates automated frameworks or writes tests, or any of those things. An SDET is the strange amalgamation of everything from full-stack to DevOps to even some product management to even a little bit machine-learning engineer; it's a truly strange field that, at least for me, has allowed me to basically embrace almost every other discipline and area of the current modern engineering around, to some degree. So, it's fun, is what it is. [laugh].Corey: This sounds similar in some respects to oh, I think back to a role that I had in 2008, 2009, where there was an entire department that was termed QA or Quality Assurance, and they were sort of the next step. You know, development would build something and start, and then deploy it to a test environment or staging environment, and then QA would climb all over this, sometimes with automation—which was still in the early days, back in that era—and sometimes by clicking the button, and going through scripts, and making sure that the website looked okay. Is that aligned with what you're doing, or is that a bit of a different branch?Sean: That is a little bit of a different branch from me. The way I would put it is QA and QA departments are an interesting artifact that I think, in particular, newer orgs still feel like they might need one, and what you quickly realize today, particularly with modern development and this, kind of, DevOps focus is that having that centralized QA department doesn't really work. So, SDETs absolutely can do all those things: They can climb over a test environment with automation, they can click the buttons, they can tell you everything's good, they can check the boxes for you if you want, but if that is what you're using your SDETs for you are, frankly, missing out because I guarantee you, the people that you've hired as SDETs have a lot more skills than that, and not utilizing those to your advantage is missing out on a lot of potential benefit, both in terms of not just quality—which is this fantastic concept that dates all the way back to—gives people a lot of weird feelings [laugh] to be frank, and product.Corey: So, one of the challenges I've always had is people talk about test-driven development, which sounds like a beautiful idea in theory, and in practice is something people—you know, just like using the AWS console, and then lying about it forms this heart and soul of ClickOps—we claim to be using test-driven development but we don't seem to be the reality of software development. And again, no judgment on these; things are hard. I built out a, more or less, piecing together a whole bunch of toothpicks and string to come up with my newsletter production pipeline. And that's about 29 Lambdas Function, behind about 5 APIs Gateway, and that was all kinds of ridiculous nonsense.And I can deploy each of the six or so microservices that do this, independently. And I sometimes even do continuous build or slash continuous deploy to it because integration would imply I have tests, which is why I bring the topic up. And more often than not—because I'm very bad at computers—I will even have syntax errors, make it into this thing, and I push the button and suddenly it doesn't work. It's the iterative guess-and-check model that goes on here. So, I introduced regressions, a fair bit at the time, and the reason that I'm being so blase about this is that I am the only customer of this system, which means that I'm not out there making people's lives harder, no one is paying me money to use this thing, no one else is being put out by it. It's just me smacking into a wall and feeling dumb all the time.And when I talk to people about the idea of building tests. And it's like, “Oh, you should have unit tests and integration tests and all the rest.” And I did some research into the topics, and a lot of it sounds like what people were talking about 10 to 15 years ago in the world of tests. And again, to be clear, I've implemented none of these things because I am irresponsible and bad at computers. But what has changed over the last five or ten years? Because it feels like the overall high level as I understood it from intro to testing 101 in the world of Python, the first 18 chapters are about dependency manager—because of course they are; it's Python—then the rest of it just seems to be the concepts that we've never really gotten away from. What's new, what's exciting, what's emerging in your space?Sean: There's definitely some emerging and exciting stuff in the space. There's everything from, like, what Applitools does with using machine learning to do visual regressions—that's a huge advantage, a huge time saver, so you don't have to look pixel by pixel, and waste your time doing it—to things like our team at TheZebra is working on, which is, for example, a framework that utilizes Directed Acrylic Graph workflows that's written GoLang—the prototype is—and it allows you to work with these tests, rather than just as kind of these blasé scripts that you either keep in a monorepo, or maybe possibly in each individual services' repo, and just run them all together clumsily in this, kind of, packaged product, into this distributed resource that lets you think about tests as these, kind of, user flows and experiences and to dip between things like API layer, where you might, for example, say introduce regression [unintelligible 00:07:48] calling to a third-party resource, and something goes wrong, you can orchestrate that workflow as a whole. Rather than just having to write a script after script after script after script to cover all these test cases, you can focus on well, I'm going to create this block that represents this general action, can accept a general payload that conforms to this spec, and I'm going to orchestrate these general actions, maybe modify the payload of it, but I can recall those actions with a slightly different payload and not have to write script after script after script after script.But the problem is that, like you've noticed, a lot of test tooling doesn't embrace those, kind of, modern practices and ideas. It's still very much the, your tests, you—particularly integration tests do this—will exist in one place, a monorepo, they will have all the resources there, they'll be packaged together, you will run them after the fact, after a deploy, on an environment. And it makes it so that all these testing tools are very reactive, they don't encourage a lot of experimentation, and they make it at times very difficult to experiment, in particular because the more tests you add, the more chaotic that code and that framework gets, and the harder it gets to run in a CI/CD environment, the longer it takes. Whereas if you have something like this graph tool that we're building, these things just become data. You can store them in a database, for the love of God. You can apply modern DevOps practices, you can implement things like Jaeger.Corey: I don't think it's ever used or anything in the database. Great, then you can use anything itself as a database, which is my entire schtick, so great.Sean: Exactly.Corey: That's right, that means the entire world can indeed be reduced to TXT records in DNS, which I maintain is the… the holiest of all databases. I'm sorry, please, continue.Sean: No, nonono, that's true. The thing that has always driven me is this idea that why are we still just, kind of, spitting out code to test things in a way that is very prescriptive and very reactive? And so, the exciting things in test come from places like Applitools and places like the—oh, I forget. It was at a Test Days conference, where they talked about—they developed this test framework that was able to auto generate the models, and then it was so good at auto generating those models for test, they'd actually ended up auto generating the models for the actual product. [laugh]. I think it used a degree of machine learning to do so. It was for a flashcard site. A friend of mine, Jacob Evans on Twitter always likes to talk about it.These are where the exciting things lay is where people are starting to break out of that very reactive, prescriptive, kind of, test philosophy of, like I like to say, checking the boxes to, “Let's stop checking boxes and let's create, like insight tooling. Let's get ahead of the curve. What is the system actively doing? Let's check in. What data do we have? What is the system doing right at this moment? How ahead of the curve can we get with what we're actually using to test?”Corey: One question I have is the cultural changes because back in those early days where things were handed off from the developers to the QA team, and then ideally to where I was sitting over in operations—lots of handoffs; not a lot of integrations there—QA was not popular on the development side of the world, specifically because their entire perception was that of, “Oh, they're just the critics. They're going to wind up doing the thing I just worked hard on and telling me what's wrong with it.” And it becomes a ‘Department of No,' on some level. One of the, I think, benefits of test automation is that suddenly you're blaming a computer for things, which is, “Yep. You are a developer. Good work.” But the idea of putting people almost in the line of fire of being either actually or perceived as the person who's the blocker, how has that evolved? And I'm really hoping the answer is that it has.Sean: In some places, yes, in some places, no. I think it's always, there's a little bit more nuance than just yes, it's all changed, it's all better, or just no, we're still back in QA are quote-unquote, “The bad guys,” and all that stuff. The perception that QA are the critics and are there to block a great idea from seeing fruition and to block you from that promotion definitely still persists. And it also persists a lot in terms of a number of other attitudes that get directed towards QA folks, in terms of the fact that our skill sets are limited to writing stuff like automation tooling for test frameworks and stuff like that, or that we only know how to use things like—okay, well, they know how to use Selenium and all this other stuff, but they don't know how to work a database, they don't know how an app [unintelligible 00:12:07] up, they don't all the work that I put in. That's really not the case. More and more so, folks I'm seeing in test have actually a lot of other engineers experience to back that up.And so the places where I do see it moving forward is actually like TheZebra, it's much more of a collaborative environment where the engineers are working together with the teams that they're embedded in or with the SDETs to build things and help things that help engineers get ahead of the curve. So, the way I propose it to folks is, “We're going to make sure you know and see exactly what you wrote in terms of the code, and that you can take full [confidence 00:12:44] on that so when you walk up to your manager for your one-on-one, you can go like, ‘I did this. And it's great. And here's what I know what it does, and this is where it goes, and this is how it affects everything else, and my test person helped me see all this, and that's awesome.'” It's this transition of QA and product as these adversarial relationships to recognizing that there's no real differentiator at all there when you stop with that reactive mindset in test. Instead of trying to just catch things you're trying to get ahead of the curve and focus on insight and that sort of thing.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats V-U-L-T-R.com slash screaming.Corey: One of my questions is, I guess, the terminology around a lot of this. If you tell me you're an SDE, I know that oh, you're a Software Development Engineer. If you tell me you're a DBA, I know oh, great, you're a Database Administrator. If you told me you're an SRE, I know oh, okay, great. You worked at Google.But what I'm trying to figure out is I don't see SDET, at least in the waters that I tend to swim in, as a title, really, other than you. Is that a relatively new emerging title? Is it one that has historically been very industry or segment-specific, or you're doing what I did, which is, “I don't know what to call myself, so I described myself as a Cloud Economist,” two words no one can define. Cloud being a bunch of other people's computers, and economist meaning claiming to know everything about money, but dresses like a flood victim. So, no one knows what I am when I make it up, and then people start giving actual job titles to people that are Cloud Economists now, and I'm starting to wonder, oh dear Lord, have I started the thing? What is, I guess, the history and positioning of SDET as a job title slash acronym?Sean: So SDET, like I was saying, it came from Microsoft, I believe, back in the double-ohs.Corey: Mmm.Sean: And other companies caught on. I think Google actually [unintelligible 00:14:33] as well. And it's hung on certain places, particularly places that feel like they need a concentrated quality department. That's where you usually will see places that have that title of SDET. It is increasingly less common because the idea of having centralized quality—like I said before, particularly with the modern, kind of, DevOps-focused development, Agile, and all that sort of thing, it becomes much, much more difficult.If you have a waterfall type of development cycle, it's a lot easier to have a central singular quality department, and then you can have SDET stuff [unintelligible 00:15:08], that gets a lot easier when you have Agile and you have that, kind of, regular integration and you have, particularly, DevOps [unintelligible 00:15:14] cycle, it becomes increasingly difficult, so a lot of places that have been moving away from that. It is definitely a strange title, but it is not entirely rare. If you want to peek, put a SDET on your LinkedIn for about two weeks and see how many offers come in, or how many folks in your inbox you get. It is absolutely in demand. People want engineers to write these test frameworks, but that's an entirely different point; that gets down to the point of the fact that people want people in these roles because a lot of test tooling, frankly, sucks.Corey: It's interesting you talk about that as a validation of it. I get remarkably few outreaches on LinkedIn, either for recruiting, which almost never happens or for trying to sell me something which happens once every week or so. My business partner has a CEO title, and he winds up getting people trying to sell him things four times a day by lunchtime, and occasionally people reaching out of, “Hey, I don't know much about your company, but if it's not going well, do you want to come work on something completely unrelated?” Great. And it's odd because both he and I have similar settings where neither of us have the ‘looking for work' box checked on LinkedIn because it turns out that does send a message to your staff who are depending on their job still being here next month, and that isn't overly positive because we're not on the market.But changing just titles and how we describe what we do and how we do it absolutely has a bearing as to how that is perceived by others. And increasingly, I'm spending more of my time focusing less on the technical substance of things and more about how what they do is being communicated. Because increasingly, what I'm finding about the world of enterprise technology and enterprise cloud and all of this murky industry in which we swim, is that the technology is great—anything can be made to work; mostly—but so few companies are doing an effective job of telling the story. And we see it with not just an engineering-land; in most in all parts of the business. People are not storytelling about what they do, about the outcomes they drive, and we're falling back to labels and buzzwords and acronyms and the rest.Where do you stand on this? I know we've spoken briefly before about how this is one of those things that you're paying attention to as well, so I know that we're not—I'm not completely off base here. What's your take on it?Sean: I definitely look at the labels and things of that sort. It's one of those things where humans like to group and aggregate things. Our brains like that degree of organization, and I'm going to say something that is very stereotypical here: This is helped a lot by social media which depends on things like hashtags and ability to group massive amounts of information is largely facilitated. And I don't know if it's caused by it, but it certainly aggravates the situation.We like being able to group things with few words. But as you said before, that doesn't help us. So, in a particular case, with something like a SDET title, yeah, that does absolutely send a signal, and it doesn't necessarily send the right one in terms of the person that you're talking to, you might have vastly different capabilities from the next SDET that you talk to. And it's were putting up a story of impact-driven, kind of, that classic way of focusing on not just the labels, but what was actually done and who had helped and who had enabled and the impact of it, that is key. The trick is trying to balance that with this increasing focus on the cut-down presentation.You and I've talked about this before, too, where you can only say so much on something like a LinkedIn profile before people just turn off their brains and they walk away to the next person. Or you can only put so much on your resume before people go, “Okay, ten pages, I'm done.” And it's just one of those things where… the trick I find that test people increasingly have is there was a very certain label applied to us that was rooted in one particular company's needs, and we have spent the better part of over a decade trying to escape and redefine that, and it's incredibly challenging. And a lot of it comes down to folks like, for example, Angie Jones, who simply, just through pure action and being very open about exactly what they're doing, change that narrative just by showing. That form of storytelling is show it, don't say it, you know? Rather than saying, “Oh, well, I bring into all this,” they just show it, and they bring it forward that way.Corey: I think you hit on something there with the idea of social media, where there is validity to the idea of being able to describe something concisely. “What's your elevator pitch?” Is a common question in business. “What is the problem you solve? What would someone use you for?”And if your answer to that requires you sabotage the elevator for 45 minutes in order to deliver your message, it's not going to work. With some products, especially very early-stage products where the only people who are working on them are the technical people building them, they have a lot of passion for the space, but they aren't—haven't quite gotten the messaging down to be able to articulate it. People's attention spans aren't great, by and large, so there's a, if it doesn't fit in a tweet, it's boring and crappy is sort of the takeaway here. And yeah, you're never going to encapsulate volume and nuance and shading into a tweet, but the baseline description of, “So, what do you do?” If it doesn't fit in a tweet, keep workshopping it, to some extent.And it's odd because I do think you're right, it leads to very yes or no, binary decisions about almost anything, someone is good or trash. There's no, people are complicated, depending upon what aspect we're talking about. And same story with companies. Companies are incredibly complex, but that tends to distill down in the Twitter ecosystem to, “Engineers are smart and executives are buffoons.” And anytime a company does something, clearly, it's a giant mistake.Well, contrary to popular opinion, Global Fortune 2000 companies do not tend to hire people who are not highly capable at the thing they're doing. They have context and nuance and constraints that are not visible from the outside. So, that is one of the frustrating parts to me. So, labels are helpful as far as explaining what someone is and where they fit in the ecosystem. For example, yeah, if you describe yourself as an SDET, I know that we're talking about testing to some extent; you're not about to show up and start talking to me extensively about, oh, I don't know, how you market observability products.It at least gives a direction and bounding to the context. The challenge I always had, why I picked a title that no one else had, was that what I do is complicated, and if once people have a label that they think encompasses where you start and where you stop, they stop listening, in some cases. What's been your experience, given that you do have a title that is not as widely traveled as a number of the more commonly used ones?Sean: Definitely that experience. I think that I've absolutely worked at places where—the thing is, though, and I do want to cite this, that when folks do end up just turning off once they have that nice little snippet that they think encompasses who you are—because increasingly nowadays, we like to attach what you do to who you are—and it makes a certain degree of sense, absolutely, but it's very hard to encompass those sorts of things, and let alone, kind of, closely nestle them together when you have, you know, 280 characters.Yes, folks like to do that to folks like SDETs. There's a definite mindset of, ‘stay in your lane,' in certain shops. I will say that it's not to the benefit of those shops, and it creates and often aggravates an adversarial relationship that is to the detriment of both, particularly today where the ability to spin up a rival product of reasonable quality and scale has never been easier, slowing yourself down with arbitrary delineations that are meant to relegate and overly-define folks, not necessarily for the actual convenience of your business, but for the convenience of your person, that is a very dangerous move. A previous company that I worked at almost lost a significant amount of their market share because they actively antagonized the SDET team to the point where several key members left. And it left them completely unable to cover areas of product with scalable automation tooling and other things. And it's a very complex product.And it almost cost them their position in the industry, potentially, the entire company as a whole got very close to that point. And that's one of the things we have to be careful of when it comes to applying these labels, is that when you apply a label to encompass someone, yes, you affect them, but it also we'll come back and affect you because when you apply that label to someone, you are immediately confining your relationship with that person. And that relationship is a two-way street. If you apply a label that closes off other roads of communication or potential collaboration or work or creativity or those sorts of things, that is your decision and you will have to accept those consequences.Corey: I've gotten the sense that a lot of folks, as they describe what they do and how they do it, they are often thinking longer-term; their careers often trend toward the thing that happens to them rather than a thing that winds up being actively managed. And… like, one of my favorite interview questions whenever I'm looking to bring someone in, it's always, “Yeah, ignore this job we're talking about. Magically you get it or you don't; whatever. That's not relevant right now. What's your next job? What's the one after that? What is the trajectory here?”And it's always fun to me to see people's responses to it. Often it's, “I have no idea,” versus the, “Oh, I want to do this, and this is the thing I'm interested in working with you for because I think it'll shore up this, this, and this.” And like, those are two extreme ends of the spectrum. There's no wrong answer, but it's helpful, I find, just to ask the question in the final round interview that I'm a part of, just to, I guess sort of like, boost them a bit into a longer-term picture view, as opposed to next week, next month, next year. Because if what you're doing doesn't bring you closer to what you want to be doing in the job after the next one, then I think you're looking at it wrong, in some cases.And I guess I'll turn the question on to you. If you look at what you're doing now, ignore whatever you do next, what's your role after that? Like, where are you aiming at?Sean: Ignoring the next position… which is interesting because I always—part of how I learned to operate, kind of in my earlier years was focus on the next two weeks because the longer you go out from that window, the more things you can't control, [laugh] and the harder it is to actually make an effective plan. But for me, the real goal is I want to be in any position that enables the hard work we do in building these things to make people's lives easier, better, give them access to additional information, maybe it's joy in terms of, like, a content platform, maybe it's something that helps other developers do what they do, something like Honeycomb, for example, just that little bit of extra insight to help them work a little bit better. And that's, for me, where I want to be, is building things that make the hard work we do to create these tools, these products easier. So, for me, that would look a lot like an internal tooling team of some sort, something that helps with developer efficiency, with workflow.One of the reasons—and it's funny because I got to asked this recently: “Why are you still even in test? You know what reputation this field has”—wrongly deserved, maybe so—“Why are you still in test?” My response was, “Because”—and maybe with a degree of hubris, stubbornly so—“I want to make things better for test.” There are a lot of issues we're facing, not just in terms of tooling, but in terms of processes, and how we think about solving problems, and like I said before, that kind of reactive nature, it sort of ends up kind of being an ouroboros, eating its own tail. Reactive tools generate reactive engineers, that then create more reactive tools, and it becomes this ouroboros eating itself.Where I want to be in terms of this is creating things that change that, push us forward in that direction. So, I think that internal tooling team is a fantastic place to do that, but frankly, any place where I could do that at any level would be fantastic.Corey: It's nice to see the things that you care about involve a lot more about around things like impact, as opposed to raw technologies and the rest. And again, I'm not passing judgment on anyone who chooses to focus on technology or different areas of these things. It's just, it's nice to see folks who are deeply technical themselves, raising their head a little bit above it and saying, “All right, here's the impact I want to have.” It's great, and lots of folks do, but I'm always frustrated when I find myself talking to folks who think that the code ultimately speaks; code is the arbiter. Like, you see this with some of the smart contract stuff, too.It's the, “All right, if you believe that's going to solve all the problems, I have a simple challenge to you, and then I will never criticize you again: Go to small claims court for a morning, four hours and watch all the disputes that wind up going through there, and ask yourselves how many of those a smart contract would have solved?”Every time I bring that point up to someone, they never come back and say, “This is still a good idea.” Maybe I'm a little too anti-computer, a little bit too human these days. But again, most of cloud economics, in my experience, is psychology more than it is math.Sean: I think it's really the truth. And I think that [unintelligible 00:29:06] that I really want to seize on for a second because code and technology as this ultimate arbiter, we've become fascinated with it, not necessarily to our benefit. One of the things you will often see me—to take a line from Game of Thrones—whinging about [laugh] is we are overly focused on utilizing technology, whether code or anything else, to solve what are fundamentally human problems. These are problems that are rooted in human tendencies, habits, characters, psychology—as you were saying—that require human interaction and influence, as uncomfortable as that may be to quote-unquote, “Solve.”And the reality of it is, is that the more that we insist upon, trying to use technology to solve those problems—things like cases of equity in terms of generational wealth and things of that sort, things like helping people communicate issues with one another within a software development engineering team—the more we will create complexity and additional problems, and the more we will fracture people's focus and ability to stay focused on what the underlying cause of the problem is, which is something human. And just as a side note, the fundamental idea that code is this ultimate arbiter of truth is terrible because if code was the ultimate arbiter of truth, I wouldn't have a job, Corey. [laugh]. I would be out of business so fast.Corey: Oh, yeah, it's great. It's—ugh, I—it feels like that's a naive perspective that people tend to have early in their career, and Lord knows I did. Everything was so straightforward and simple, back when I was in that era, whereas the older I get, the more the world is shades of nuance.Sean: There are cases where technology can help, but I tend to find those a very specific class of solutions, and even then they can only assist a human with maybe providing some additional context. This is an idea from a Seeking SRE book that I love to reference—I think it's, like, the first chapter—the Chief of Netflix SRE, I think it is, he talks about this is this, solving problems is this thing of relaying context, establishing context—and he focused a lot less on the technology side, a lot more of the human side, and brings in, like, “The technology can help this because it can give you a little bit better insight of how to communicate context, but context is valuable, but you're still going to have to do some talking at the end of the day and establish these human relationships.” And I think that technology can help with a very specific class of insight or context issues, but I would like to reemphasize that is a very specific class, and very specific sort, and most of the human problems we're trying to solve the technology don't fall in there.Corey: I think that's probably a great place for us to call it an episode. I really appreciate the way you view these things. I think that you are one of the most empathetic people that I find myself talking to on an ongoing basis. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Sean: You can find me on Twitter at S-C—underscore—code, capital U, capital M. That's probably the best place to find me. I'm most frequently on there.Corey: We will, of course, include links to that in the [show notes 00:32:37].Sean: And then, of course, my LinkedIn is not a bad place to reach out. So, you can probably find me there, Sean Corbett, working at TheZebra. And as always, you can reach me at scorbett@thezebra.com. That is my work email; feel free to email me there if you have any questions.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to all of that in the [show notes 00:33:00]. Sean, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Sean: Thank you.Corey: Sean Corbett, Senior Software Development Engineer in Test at TheZebra—because there's only one. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry ranting comment about how absolutely code speaks, and it is the ultimate arbiter of truth, and oh wait, what's that the FBI is at the door make some inquiries about your recent online behavior.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

The very name of the product - Application Express (APEX) - suggests that this is a tool solely for building applications, and thus it should belong solely in the realm of developers. But that is underselling the ability of APEX to be a perfect use case for a different IT demographic - the Database Administrator. In this episode I present my reasons for APEX is a vital part of the DBA toolkit, and how a DBA using APEX can free up their time to more efficiently manage the databases in their organisation. If you like this episode, be sure you hit the Like button and share it with your colleagues. Catch me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/connor_mc_d if you have comments or questions. Check out APEX at https://apex.oracle.com/  

Sean Sweeney is a frequent author and speaker on cybersecurity. In this episode of Security Confidential Sean talks about cloud security. He has a deep background in cloud security. Sean currently leads the Field CISO and Cloud Security Advisor group within Oracle North America Cloud Engineering. In his prior role Sean was with Microsoft where he was the Global Chief Security Advisor. Sean is a previous Chief Information Security Officer at the University of Pittsburgh, and Litigation Support Applications Manager for the U.S. Department of Justice. Sean began his career as a Database Administrator for ExxonMobil and the U.S. Department of the Interior. 00:09 Sean Sweeney's Background 01:38 From DB Admin to CISO 05:00 Helping Dave Hickton prosecute cyber criminals 06:52 The future of cybersecurity 07:20 SAS, PAS, IAS-Your responsibilities in cloud cybersecurity 13:33 If IP is exfiltrated from the cloud app, whose responsible? 14:30 What gets popped in the cloud environment! 15:23 What is the difference between zero trust and SASE? 19:45 What is the order of implementing elements of SASE or Zero Trust 23:10 The role of MDM in BYOD 26:54 Too much friction is a risk 32:27 Should the CISO work for the CIO? 36:58 How do you secure hybrid cloud environment? 42:34 Accelerator Program at Oracle 45:49 Dealing with Ransomware 50:26 Struggling with vulnerability management To learn more about Dark Rhino Security

Imagine: citizens working with the government to develop technology that makes their community a more joyous and equitable place to live. New Mexicans are exploring the promise of the civic tech movement, most recently at the DataFest ArtQuest, sponsored by the City of Albuquerque and the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government. On this program we're talking with Eric Renz-Whitmore, a lead organizer of the DataFest: ArtQuest event, and Karen Mazur, Public Art Project Coordinator and Database Administrator for the city of Albuquerque Public Art Program. https://www.cabq.gov/abq-data/

Imagine: citizens working with the government to develop technology that makes their community a more joyous and equitable place to live. New Mexicans are exploring the promise of the civic tech movement, most recently at the DataFest ArtQuest, sponsored by the City of Albuquerque and the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government. On this program we're talking with Eric Renz-Whitmore, a lead organizer of the DataFest: ArtQuest event, and Karen Mazur, Public Art Project Coordinator and Database Administrator for the city of Albuquerque Public Art Program. https://www.cabq.gov/abq-data/

For years, the role of development operations teams has been perceived as a data and technology-focused position within the nonprofit world. As technology, nonprofits, and the way we fundraise has significantly changed over the last few decades, so has the role of the operations team. For organizations and leaders willing to evolve, this presents an incredible opportunity – both for the organization's success and the individual's advancement. In today's episode, Deb Taft, CEO of Lindauer and Luis Morales, senior director of information strategy at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, chat with guest host Ashley Sweeney of Blackbaud about the ways that today's DBAs are adding value to the organization, how leaders can maximize this impact, and what operations team members should do to advance their career.   Topics Discussed in This Episode: The value that operational teams offer healthcare organizations How leaders in the organization play a key role in the operation team's value Cross-functional teams Why DBA is an important and interesting area to work right now The different types of people needed to work in the area Why you need to develop communication and relationship skills How to think about diversity in donor and prospect pools The evolution and opportunity of the role   Resources: Deb Taft Luis Morales Promoting Your Value as a Database Administrator Confessions of a Database Administrator Confessions of a Database Administrator, Part II Ashley's Favorite Things   Quotes:  “The value I see the operations team offering is collaboratively ensuring that our clients, their colleagues, have the context they need to make strategic data-driven decisions.” “The value of the operations team is different and differently valued than it was years ago as a profound driver really of nonprofits and advancement results.” “The operations team can create value by enriching conversations.” “It's about more than just filling requests and mailing lists and reports. We are the subject matter experts for the organization's data, integrations, trends, etc.” “I encourage my team to work as an internal consulting company with different business units in the foundation are our clients.”

Imagine: citizens working with the government to develop technology that makes their community a more joyous and equitable place to live. New Mexicans are exploring the promise of the civic tech movement, most recently at the DataFest ArtQuest, sponsored by the City of Albuquerque and the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government. On this program we're talking with Eric Renz-Whitmore, a lead organizer of the DataFest: ArtQuest event, and Karen Mazur, Public Art Project Coordinator and Database Administrator for the city of Albuquerque Public Art Program. https://www.cabq.gov/abq-data/

Imagine: citizens working with the government to develop technology that makes their community a more joyous and equitable place to live. New Mexicans are exploring the promise of the civic tech movement, most recently at the DataFest ArtQuest, sponsored by the City of Albuquerque and the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government. On this program we're talking with Eric Renz-Whitmore, a lead organizer of the DataFest: ArtQuest event, and Karen Mazur, Public Art Project Coordinator and Database Administrator for the city of Albuquerque Public Art Program. https://www.cabq.gov/abq-data/

What are GCLIDs and how important are they to your marketing? You may have heard about GCLIDs or Google Click IDs, but aren’t entirely sure what they do and their impact. Which is why I’m dedicating this entire episode to everything about GCLIDs. At the end of this, you’ll know whether they’re important to you, what’s their impact on your bid strategies, how often you should be importing conversions, and much much more. Prepare to get more familiar as we all dive into GCLIDS. Episode Highlights: What is GCLID and what it’s for [00:45] What Google uses GCLID data for [03:22] Value-based bidding vs. volume-based bidding [04:46] You don’t need to upload conversions within an hour [06:00] Is there a minimum amount of sales when uploading? [08:29] The issue when optimizing to multiple conversion actions [09:11] Why you should upload the delayed conversions [11:23] Always consider what data you’re sending to educate Google [14:35] Resource Links: Visit the Wicked Reports Website (https://www.wickedreports.com/) About Our Host: Scott Desgrosseilliers is the Co-Founder & CEO of Wicked Reports. Starting out as a Database Administrator, he and his friend, Mark Murrell, made a breakthrough in digital marketing, particularly on Facebook and later founded Wicked Reports in 2015. Based in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the company has continued to grow and is successfully helping small businesses and entrepreneurs get a real ROI and maximize their ad spending & unpaid social activities. Thank you for tuning in! If you liked this episode, please don’t forget to subscribe, tune in, and share this podcast. Connect with E-Commerce Insights by Wicked Reports: Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtHcqeadfhEzvN_zbQfEzdg Like us on Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/WickedReports Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wicked-reports/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Is real-time data always better than delayed data? Facebook, Google, and Amazon are now providing conversion data. But getting data quickly is not actually the best in every situation. And when you feed that data into your ad platform and let the A.I. optimize your campaign, well, things may not turn out the way you hope. The truth is there are issues with real-time data which a lot of people are ignorant about. So in this episode, I’m going to tackle all this to hopefully shed a better light on this topic. Get to know the real deal when it comes to real-time data by tuning in now. Episode Highlights: Amazon, Facebook, and Google aren’t actually giving you real-time data [01:08] Is the algorithm optimizing to support your goals? [05:01] Facebook’s puzzling requirement for customer lifetime value data [06:14] Sending data too fast creates volatility [08:16] When real-time data doesn’t make sense [10:25] Looking from the top down and longer is better [15:31] Resource Links: Visit the Wicked Reports Website (https://www.wickedreports.com/) About Our Host: Scott Desgrosseilliers is the Co-Founder & CEO of Wicked Reports. Starting out as a Database Administrator, he and his friend, Mark Murrell, made a breakthrough in digital marketing, particularly on Facebook and later founded Wicked Reports in 2015. Based in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the company has continued to grow and is successfully helping small businesses and entrepreneurs get a real ROI and maximize their ad spending & unpaid social activities. Thank you for tuning in! If you liked this episode, please don’t forget to subscribe, tune in, and share this podcast. Connect with E-Commerce Insights by Wicked Reports: Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtHcqeadfhEzvN_zbQfEzdg Like us on Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/WickedReports Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wicked-reports/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Guest Mr. Bob Reyes of YoungCTO Rafi Quisumbing Tech Journalist, Writer, Blogger, MOODLE Administrator & Trainer, Application Developer, Database Administrator, and Project Manager in a wide variety of business applications. Particularly interested in client/server and relational database design using Oracle, Sybase, and MS-SQL Server. Always interested in migration projects, as well as close interaction with the DB manufacturers. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobreyes/​ Join Mozilla: https://join.mozillaph.org​ Specialties: Budget-friendly Website & Email Hosting; Domain Registration at very affordable rates; Website Design & Development; Software Design & Programming. If you want to be a guest here, please reach out to me anywhere. Kahit mag comment lang oks na.

Mambo vipi, kwenye toleo hili nimezungumza na Lambert Almasi, Lambert ni mtalaam wa kanzi data yaani database. Ninafahamu msingi wa mfumo wowote uko kwenye kanzi data. Mazungumzo yangu ya Lumbert yalijikita katika kuchanganua kwa kina umuhimu wa kanzi data na shughuli ambayo msimamizi wa kanzi data au Database Administrator anapaswa kufanya.Kwenye mazungumzo yetu. nilitambua dhamani kubwa waliyonayo hawa wasimamizi wa kanzi data ikanilazimu kudadisi zaidi kwa Lambert kuhusu faragha au privacy ya taarifa kwenye kanzi data, nina imani ujifunza sana.

Resource Links: Visit the Wicked Reports Website (https://www.wickedreports.com/) Get the Wicked Reports Playbook here (https://help.wickedreports.com/the-wicked-reports-playbook) Gathering data and getting insights are both useless if you don’t take action. Today’s Ecommerce Insights podcast is near and dear to my heart. Having spent 20,000 hours knee-deep in marketing attribution, I know what creates success or failure when you act on marketing insights. So I’m going to explain what you need to do to turn your data into actions that get you the results you want. Stop wasting the insights you’re getting. Listen to this episode so you can take action now. Episode Highlights: Why it’s important to act on data [00:53] Key decisions to be able to act on the insights [03:25] What’s your goal [03:48] What’s the timeframe for reaching your goal [05:50] Do you have a validated framework for acting on the data [08:03] Introducing the Wicked Reports Playbook [11:01] The most valuable insights take time to get [11:55] The line defining cold from warm traffic [14:16] How to use the playbook to turn goals into insights [15:23] Determine the correct attribution model [15:33] Finding the cold traffic leads that turn into high paying customers [16:59] Our framework for acting on new lead ROI [17:42] Our framework for acting on low ROI campaigns [20:44] Why we’re passionate about turning data into action [23:15] About Our Host: Scott Desgrosseilliers is the Co-Founder & CEO of Wicked Reports. Starting out as a Database Administrator, he and his friend, Mark Murrell, made a breakthrough in digital marketing, particularly on Facebook and decided to found Wicked Reports in 2015. Based in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the company has continued to grow for the next five years, helping small businesses and entrepreneurs get a real ROI and maximize their ad spending & unpaid social activities. Thank you for tuning in! If you liked this episode, please don’t forget to subscribe, tune in, and share this podcast. Connect with E-Commerce Insights by Wicked Reports: Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtHcqeadfhEzvN_zbQfEzdg Like us on Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/WickedReports Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wicked-reports/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What’s really going to occur when the iOS update rolls out? For today’s Ecommerce Insights episode, I’m going to clear up all the confusion and explain a few of the things that are going to happen. Then I’ll share with you the opportunities where you can get a massive edge over your competition. Want to know how you can get ahead? Listen to this episode now. Episode Highlights: The agenda for today’s webinar [00:49] What Facebook’s email on the impact of iOS 14.5 mean [03:19] 1-day click-through opt-out data is going to be modeled [03:45] Facebook will no longer track iPhone data [05:11] Attribution settings default changes to 7-day click-through [06:05] Attribution methodology shifts from impression time to conversion time [08:02] iOS 14.5 opted out events will no longer be included [09:03] Conversion API is useful, but it won’t fix the problem [09:59] 3 opportunities to take advantage of & beat your competition [13:06] How to use Wicked Reports to get an edge [17:17] Webinar Q & A [21:44] How is Wicked Reports protected from this? [22:03] Will Facebook see one event for opted-out users? [22:32] Will you still see the highest prioritized event? [24:10] Which conversion will Wicked Reports detect if you advertise only on Facebook? [25:02] Quiz: iOS 14.5 impact [27:28] On sales measurement: User opts out, will the sale show up in Facebook ad manager? [28:29] On sales measurement: User opts out, will the sale show up if you send it to Facebook by conversion API? [30:16] Impact on retargeting measurement: User opts out, will a lead gen campaign show a lead? Will a retargeting campaign show a sale? [30:44] On events reported for the same user: User opts in, will a lead gen campaign show a lead? Will a retargeting campaign show a sale? [31:55] On 7-day attribution window: User opts in, buys 8 days after clicking on an ad, will it show up in Facebook ad manager? [33:14] Third-party vs. first-party data [33:38] Resource Links: Visit the Wicked Reports Website (https://www.wickedreports.com/) About Our Host: Scott Desgrosseilliers is the Co-Founder & CEO of Wicked Reports. Starting out as a Database Administrator, he and his friend, Mark Murrell, made a breakthrough in digital marketing, particularly on Facebook and decided to found Wicked Reports in 2015. Based in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the company has continued to grow for the next five years, helping small businesses and entrepreneurs get a real ROI and maximize their ad spending & unpaid social activities. Thank you for tuning in! If you liked this episode, please don’t forget to subscribe, tune in, and share this podcast. Connect with E-Commerce Insights by Wicked Reports: Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtHcqeadfhEzvN_zbQfEzdg Like us on Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/WickedReports Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wicked-reports/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Database administrators (also commonly called database managers, DBAs or DBMs) are often operating behind the scenes, outside of the spotlight. However, DBAs are critical team members and it's important they promote their value within their organizations. That's what today's host and guests are here to discuss. Listen in as guest host Ashley Sweeney, Technical Solutions Engineer for Blackbaud talks to Sunshine Watson, Donor Database Manager for Valleywise Health Foundation, and Carlene Johnson, Database Administrator for BC High, about how they shine as DBAs and make sure their value is recognized. They also discuss the importance of networking and continuing education.   Topics Discussed in This Episode: How Sunshine and Carlene shine as DBAs Helping others understand what you do and how you help them Making sure you have a seat at the table Tips for showing your value to leadership Making the case for professional development to your manager The value of networking and user groups   Resources: Sunshine Watson Carlene Johnson Confessions of a Nonprofit Database Administrator Confessions of a Nonprofit Database Administrator, Part II   Quotes:  “Just being able to be a fly on the wall sometimes helps me so I can do my job better.” –Sunshine Watson “When I'm paying attention and listening, I can hear the pain points.” –Carlene Johnson “Because of networking, I was much more easily able to land a position that had the kinds of things I was looking to work on.” –Carlene Johnson

Resource Links: Visit the Wicked Reports Website (https://www.wickedreports.com/) iOS IDFA and ATT Quiz and Survival Guide (http://wrgo.io/WickedReports/18553) Big changes are about to happen with the upcoming Apple iOS 14 update. If you’re in the marketing industry, this is sure to have a significant impact. Will it be good, or will it affect your lead conversion? After spending 20,000 hours on first-party data, I feel that I’m uniquely qualified to talk about what I know about the upcoming IDFA changes and how it will affect the industry. Find out more by diving into this episode now. Episode Highlights: So what exactly is going to happen? [01:44] Wicked Report’s first-party data is privacy compliant [04:24] Conversions API won’t work around the IDFA restrictions [05:46] The survival guide to navigating the changes [08:29] Getting people to opt in is more important than ever [11:17] Diversify your advertising in multiple platforms [12:21] Why you should prioritize lifetime value over immediate hourly results [12:43] Look into other ways to capture first-party date [14:25] Take our quiz then grab our iOS 14 Survival Guide [16:01] About Our Host: Scott Desgrosseilliers is the Co-Founder & CEO of Wicked Reports. Starting out as a Database Administrator, he and his friend, Mark Murrell, made a breakthrough in digital marketing, particularly on Facebook and decided to found Wicked Reports in 2015. Based in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the company has continued to grow for the next five years, helping small businesses and entrepreneurs get a real ROI and maximize their ad spending & unpaid social activities. Thank you for listening to the show! If you liked this episode, please don’t forget to subscribe, tune in, and share this podcast. Connect with E-commerce Insights by Wicked Reports: Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtHcqeadfhEzvN_zbQfEzdg Like us on Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/WickedReports Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wicked-reports/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Resource Links: Visit the Wicked Reports Website (https://www.wickedreports.com/) Time is a big factor in the buying cycle. If you don’t understand when you should wait and when you should spend the money, then you could be wasting thousands of dollars in ad spend. This is where marketing attribution steps in. It gives you the right data so you can strike and defeat your competitors at the top of the funnel. It’s so easy to forget about considering how time can affect your data. So today, I specifically want to cover this so that you’ll know how long it takes for you to get new leads, how long it takes for you to breakeven, and when you should spend more on your campaign, be it Google or Facebook. Learn to scale your ROI and kill the things that aren’t working by tuning in to this episode. Episode Highlights: Time can screw up the accuracy of your data [01:21] Top of the funnel campaign measurement period: How long leads take to buy [03:26] Determining how long a campaign should last [06:09] Customer lifetime value: How long leads breakeven and double [08:32] Putting all things together in the right attribution model [11:52] Spending more through in a Google campaign [13:47] Optimizing ROI in a Facebook ad campaign [17:24] About Our Host: Scott Desgrosseilliers is the Co-Founder & CEO of Wicked Reports. Starting out as a Database Administrator, he and his friend, Mark Murrell, made a breakthrough in digital marketing, particularly on Facebook and decided to found Wicked Reports in 2015. Based in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the company has continued to grow for the next five years, helping small businesses and entrepreneurs get a real ROI and maximize their ad spending & unpaid social activities. Thank you for listening to the show! If you liked this episode, please don’t forget to subscribe, tune in, and share this podcast. Connect with E-commerce Insights by Wicked Reports: Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtHcqeadfhEzvN_zbQfEzdg Like us on Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/WickedReports Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wicked-reports/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Resource Links: Visit the Wicked Reports Website (https://www.wickedreports.com/) Wondering why your conversion rates are stagnating, if not dropping? If you find yourself looking at low conversion rates despite running a seemingly effective marketing campaign, then maybe you haven’t paid close attention to your new leads attribution process. As a small business owner, you might think that lead acquisition is just as simple as buying leads or blasting paid advertising through social media. But, are you sure you are properly directing your marketing campaign to the right people? When was the last time you looked at your email list? Today, we learn more about new lead attribution, why you need to understand how it works, and what makes it essential in scaling your business. I also talk about the different strategies you can use to optimize your lead attribution process and reach your customers effectively. Want that cold traffic to warm up to your business? Tune in to this episode. Episode Highlights: Why top-of-funnel ads fail in getting new leads [01:15] Marketing is just like dating [02:23] The nitty-gritty of new leads attribution [04:33] Capturing cold traffic and converting them into leads is a slow process [06:35] Strategies you can use in getting new leads [08:24] Targeting customers on Facebook [10:31] Optimizing Google algorithm to get cold traffic [12:06] About Our Host: Scott Desgrosseilliers is the Co-Founder & CEO of Wicked Reports. Starting out as a Database Administrator, he and his friend, Mark Murrell, made a breakthrough in digital marketing, particularly on Facebook and decided to found Wicked Reports in 2015. Based in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the company has continued to grow for the next five years, helping small businesses and entrepreneurs get a real ROI and maximize their ad spending & unpaid social activities. Thank you for listening to the show! If you liked this episode, please don’t forget to subscribe, tune in, and share this podcast. Connect with E-commerce Insights by Wicked Reports: Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtHcqeadfhEzvN_zbQfEzdg Like us on Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/WickedReports Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wicked-reports/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Resource Links: Visit the Wicked Reports Website (https://www.wickedreports.com/) What is that secret formula that allows ecommerce companies to do so well at marketing attribution, they continue to scale to 8 figures? At some point, you might be wondering why most (if not all) ecommerce giants have incredibly high conversion rates. Well, the first thing that you need to know is that there is no big secret. The second thing is, everything you need to scale your business is already at your fingertips. Find out how you can even the playing field in today’s episode as I talk about the three essential marketing attribution elements that are possible drivers for higher leads and sales for your business. Be the next 8-figure ecommerce business by tuning in to this episode now! Episode Highlights: Cold traffic takes time to buy [01:16] What do you do with cold traffic? [03:59] How attribution drives the buying cycle and time conversion [05:05] Cold vs warm: lead conversion to sale conversion [06:52] How email marketing—combined with paid leads—seals the deal [08:16] Auto-tagging makes a difference [11:08] Why everyone’s moving to subscriptions LTV [12:44] About Our Host: Scott Desgrosseilliers is the Co-Founder & CEO of Wicked Reports. Starting out as a Database Administrator, he and his friend, Mark Murrell, made a breakthrough in digital marketing, particularly on Facebook and later founded Wicked Reports in 2015. Based in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the company has grown and is successfully helping small businesses and entrepreneurs get a real ROI and maximize their ad spending & unpaid social activities. Thank you for tuning in! If you liked this episode, please don’t forget to subscribe, tune in, and share this podcast. Connect with E-Commerce Insights by Wicked Reports: Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/WickedReports Like on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WickedReports Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wicked-reports Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wickedreports/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Resource Links: Visit the Wicked Reports Website (https://www.wickedreports.com/) Without a doubt, lead generation is essential in making new sales and scaling businesses. That’s why tracking touchpoints that generate the best leads is crucial. But, not knowing the key points in marketing attribution could hurt your company. Whether businesses are consciously or unconsciously making these mistakes, letting them build up over time is a big no-no. So, what are these mistakes and how can you avoid them? Find out in today’s episode as we discuss the five attribution failures that are detrimental to your business. By learning these points, you can make better marketing decisions for your company. Tune in to this new episode now! Episode Highlights: Needing every click tracked [01:46] Only the important touch points need to be tracked [04:02] Confusing MTA with STA [06:46] Mismatching model and goal [08:00] When to use STA & MTA to determine lead gen [10:03] The downside of multi-touch attribution [12:50] Trying to verify conversions through ad platforms [14:03] Comparing marketing attribution solutions and ad platform results [17:26] Manual tagging of subscriptions to determine customer LTV [19:04] About Our Host: Scott Desgrosseilliers is the Co-Founder & CEO of Wicked Reports. Starting out as a Database Administrator, he and his friend, Mark Murrell, made a breakthrough in digital marketing, particularly on Facebook and later founded Wicked Reports in 2015. Based in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the company has grown and since been helping small businesses and entrepreneurs get a real ROI and maximize their ad spending & unpaid social activities. Thank you for tuning in! If you liked this episode, please don’t forget to subscribe, tune in, and share this podcast. Connect with E-Commerce Insights by Wicked Reports: Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/WickedReports Like on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WickedReports Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wicked-reports Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wickedreports/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Resource Links: Visit the Wicked Reports Website (https://www.wickedreports.com/) How sure are you that a particular ad led to a sale of your product or service? For big tech companies like Apple and Facebook, tracking data is part of their business. The question is how much of the data is accurate. While these tech giants might attribute your sales to ads placed on their platform, you won’t really know for sure unless you get to the bottom of everything. Today, I want to go over three very crucial things - cookies, tracking pixels, and third-party data. What are they? Can you rely on the data you’re getting? And how do the changes implemented by Apple and Facebook impact lead attribution? Tune in now and get the lowdown on data, cookies, and tracking. Episode Highlights: What’s the deal with Apple blocking IDFA? [01:22] First-party data cookies are now more important [03:48] What cookies and tracking pixels do [06:37] Apple’s 7-day cookie expiration impacting first clicks tracking [09:49] It’s time to shift to new lead capture [16:18] Facebook’s Conversions API might only cloud your data [17:59] About Our Host: Scott Desgrosseilliers is the Co-Founder & CEO of Wicked Reports. Starting out as a Database Administrator, he and his friend, Mark Murrell, made a breakthrough in digital marketing, particularly on Facebook and later founded Wicked Reports in 2015. Based in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the company has continued to grow and is successfully helping small businesses and entrepreneurs get a real ROI and maximize their ad spending & unpaid social activities. Thank you for listening to the show! If you liked this episode, please don’t forget to subscribe, tune in, and share this podcast. Connect with E-commerce Insights by Wicked Reports: Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtHcqeadfhEzvN_zbQfEzdg Like us on Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/WickedReports Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wicked-reports/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Resource Links: Visit the Wicked Reports Website (https://www.wickedreports.com/) With all the positive results you get from your Facebook Ad analytics, it’s tricky finding the true answer to this question - Is your marketing working or not? What most don’t know, the real truth is hidden behind a lot of misconceptions. This is where marketing attribution steps in. It is the tool, the gateway that helps you understand your customers better. And it tells you what’s actually going on in your business and marketing. For this reason, I’ve decided to start a podcast. Yes, a podcast on marketing attribution and analytics because what we stand for here at Wicked Reports is shedding the light on real data. Data that allows you to find the right customers for you to scale. Maybe marketing attribution can help you. Maybe at times it’s in the middle of a gray area. But whatever it is, we’re going to cover it. So what are you waiting for? Tune in now. Episode Highlights: Marketing attribution isn’t for the faint of heart [01:05] The flawed premise behind Facebook ad analytics [02:35] What lead attribution does [07:30] The origin story of Wicked Reports: Facebook sucks for Maine lobsters [09:01] Sometimes people don’t buy right away [16:11] You have to understand the whole customer journey [21:11] Attribution points out where you need to double down [25:04] About Our Host: Scott Desgrosseilliers is the Co-Founder & CEO of Wicked Reports. Starting out as a Database Administrator, he and his friend, Mark Murrell, made a breakthrough in digital marketing, particularly on Facebook and later founded Wicked Reports in 2015. Based in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the company has continued to grow and is successfully helping small businesses and entrepreneurs get a real ROI and maximize their ad spending & unpaid social activities. Thank you for listening to the show! If you liked this episode, please don’t forget to subscribe, tune in, and share this podcast. Connect with E-commerce Insights by Wicked Reports: Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtHcqeadfhEzvN_zbQfEzdg Like us on Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/WickedReports Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wicked-reports/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Gail Robinson, Owner, and CRM Administrator at Robinson Business Solutions has extensive experience in Database Management & CRM software. With over a decade of Database Administrator experience serving businesses in their Database needs.Robinson Business Solutions is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software Consulting and Implementation firm that was founded to help small businesses realize a return on their Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, and other CRM investment by setting the software up to run as a fully functioning business tool that automates business processes, increase client and prospect engagement, and drive profits.Gail Robinson is an Army veteran and she shares similarities and differences between her experience in the Army and as an entrepreneur. That's not all, Gail explains why it's important for business owners to have a solution-based CRM software in place.Gail helps small businesses realize a return on their investment with Salesforce, Hubspot, ZOHO, and other software systems.  Other areas of discussion during the interview consist of the following: COVID-19 impact on businesses and how having a CRM system in place makes a difference.Trends for small businesses that have a CRM in place.Trends on the horizon for database management systems.Visit Gail Robinson's website and you will receive a few free gifts (software applications). https://robinsonbiz.com/Host - Paul Lawrence VannPhone (800) 341-6719Email: info@paulvannspeaks.comPodcast Website: www.wealthacademypodcast.comSponsorship Opportunities: https://bit.ly/2G4FMV5

Data lakes offer a great deal of flexibility and the potential for reduced cost for your analytics, but they also introduce a great deal of complexity. What used to be entirely managed by the database engine is now a composition of multiple systems that need to be properly configured to work in concert. In order to bring the DBA into the new era of data management the team at Upsolver added a SQL interface to their data lake platform. In this episode Upsolver CEO Ori Rafael and CTO Yoni Iny describe how they have grown their platform deliberately to allow for layering SQL on top of a robust foundation for creating and operating a data lake, how to bring more people on board to work with the data being collected, and the unique benefits that a data lake provides. This was an interesting look at the impact that the interface to your data can have on who is empowered to work with it.

What does “space is for everyone” really mean? Nicole Chase tackles this question in her work. In order to make the space industry accessible for everyone, it’s important to understand what the phrase truly means.  A woman with many titles, Nicole is the Director of Projects for SEDS, Director of the Student Space Ambassador Program for The Mars Generation, and a Database Administrator for Made in Space. She recently submitted an abstract about the importance of young leadership in the space industry, and why it is crucial to foster an environment that young leaders thrive in. Additionally, she presented about the concept of “space is for everyone” at the SpaceUp Unconference and the Space Science in Context 2020 conference.  In this episode, we talk to Nicole about what “space is for everyone” means, how to foster young leadership, and how to make the industry an inclusive space (no pun intended) for all.

Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at [almartintalksdata@gmail.com] and tell us why you should be next. AbstractOur guest this week is Jacques Roy, Executive IT Specialist for Watson Data and AI at IBM. Jacques has extensive experience within IBM's technical engagement groups, on both sales and development teams. He talks us through the need to continue to evolve with the industry, as failing to do so can often lead you to become obsolete and less competitive within the job market. He argues that the effort required to get up to speed is more often less demanding than what it may seem, and he has created a youtube channel dedicated to helping others become apart of the conversation. Connect with JacquesLinkedInTwitter YouTubeMediumShow Notes01:36 - Check out these cool things to do in Portland.07:05 - Are you new to sales? Take a look at these tips for getting started in the industry. 18:57 - This article focuses on how the Database Administrator role is changing.23:39 - Get an overview of Informix here.Connect with the TeamProducer Liam Seston - LinkedIn.Producer Lana Cosic - LinkedIn.Producer Meighann Helene - LinkedIn. Producer Mark Simmonds - LinkedIn. Host Al Martin - LinkedIn and Twitter.

Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at [almartintalksdata@gmail.com] and tell us why you should be next. AbstractOur guest this week is Jacques Roy, Executive IT Specialist for Watson Data and AI at IBM. Jacques has extensive experience within IBM's technical engagement groups, on both sales and development teams. He talks us through the need to continue to evolve with the industry, as failing to do so can often lead you to become obsolete and less competitive within the job market. He argues that the effort required to get up to speed is more often less demanding than what it may seem, and he has created a youtube channel dedicated to helping others become apart of the conversation. Connect with JacquesLinkedInTwitter YouTubeMediumShow Notes01:36 - Check out these cool things to do in Portland.07:05 - Are you new to sales? Take a look at these tips for getting started in the industry. 18:57 - This article focuses on how the Database Administrator role is changing.23:39 - Get an overview of Informix here.Connect with the TeamProducer Liam Seston - LinkedIn.Producer Lana Cosic - LinkedIn.Producer Meighann Helene - LinkedIn. Producer Mark Simmonds - LinkedIn. Host Al Martin - LinkedIn and Twitter.

This week on the podcast, Jeffrey Palermo had the pleasure of visiting with Mark Dunn to record today’s show! Mark is a long-time developer and software architect who was an original co-host on the .NET Rocks podcast that started back in 2002. Mark is a Microsoft Certified Trainer, Application Developer, Solution Developer for .NET, and Database Administrator; and has over 30 years of experience in the disciplines of Software Engineering, Database Administration, and Project Management.    Since 2003, Mark has been awarded MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) status for his contributions to the Visual Studio and .NET Community. He has also traveled all over the world delivering training in the areas of .NET and Database Development, Project Management and Client-Side Development. Outside of the tech industry, Mark owns an Angus cattle farm in Alabama and is often found playing the drums!   In Jeffrey’s and Mark’s conversation today they discuss what a developer’s retirement looks like! Mark considers himself currently ‘semi-retired’ with the goal of fully retiring 3 years down the line. He provides training and mentoring through his company, Dunn Training, teaching courses on Azure, Modern Web Development, ASP .NET, .NET Programming, Databases, Java, and more. Mark also takes listeners down memory lane, reminiscing about the progress in the industry, his career as a programmer, and the changes he’s seen in DevOps.   Topics of Discussion: [:39] Be sure to visit AzureDevOps.Show for past episodes and show notes. [:48] About today’s guest, Mark Dunn! [2:20] Jeffrey welcomes Mark to the podcast. [3:09] Mark provides some background on his career and shares some highlights! [4:50] What the industry was like when Mark was just starting out as a programmer. [11:36] Mark speaks about what a longtime programmer’s retirement looks like (as someone who is currently ‘semi-retired’!) He also shares what his goals are for the future and what he’s currently up to. [16:07] A word from Azure DevOps Podcast’s sponsor: Clear Measure. [16:34] Jeffrey gives some quick announcements. [18:22] With the perspective of having seen so many paradigms of software, how has that colored Mark’s view of the modern DevOps movement? [22:30] Mark reads a lot of books as a trainer… but has he authored any books? [23:54] Mark speaks about some of the aspects of training and teaching his courses. [25:20] Mark speaks about recording .NET Rocks Podcast and the joys of interviewing people in the industry. [26:22] Mark gives his predictions on what he thinks is most likely to happen in the industry of custom software and what will become more and more important for current programmers to know/learn. [29:09] Does Mark find that the technology landscape is starting to contract after exploding? [31:11] Mark shares his plan for the next few years and what his transition into retirement will look like. [33:16] How long will Mark be keeping up his mentoring service? [34:40] What Mark hopes to do in retirement. [35:31] Mark gives some parting advice to new programmers to have a successful career. [38:01] Jeffrey thanks Mark for joining him in this episode!   Mentioned in this Episode: Azure DevOps Clear Measure (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon! bit.ly/dotnetdevopsebook — Click here to download the .NET DevOps for Azure ebook! bit.ly/dotnetdevopsbookforcommunity — Visit to get your hands on two free books to give away at conferences or events! Jeffrey Palermo’s Youtube Jeffrey Palermo’s Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events! Jeffrey@Clear-Measure.com — Email Jeffrey for a free 30-point DevOps inspection (regularly priced at $5000!) — Spaces are limited! Dunn Training (Mark’s Company) .NET Rocks Podcast Dan Appleman’s Books Selenium The Art of Unit Testing: with examples in C#, by Roy Osherove Pluralsight Udemy Scott Guthrie   Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

In this episode, Ahmad invites an IT specialist, specifically a Database Administrator, to discuss Education, Career, Finances and Investments. This is part 1 of 2 and focuses mainly on career in IT. Visit www.vitaleducators.com if you are looking for a tutor/ coachSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/vitaleducators)

Thursday, November 7, 2019 Ranging from open-access collections to interactive maps and new forms of digital media, museums have expanding opportunities for presence online. Through two case studies, this panel highlights new and in-progress digital resources at the Freer|Sackler, the Smithsonian’s museums of Asian art. It especially considers the role of curators in the development of websites and in-gallery digital features. The two case studies will open discussions on collaborations between curatorial and digital departments. The Southeast Asia Collections Website is a portal into all related objects, exhibitions, events, and resources at the museum. Its centerpieces are a filtered collection search and a robust interactive map of sacred sites in Southeast Asia, built from firsthand field research and amply illustrated with site photos. The exhibition, Body of Devotion: The Cosmic Buddha in 3D, resulted from diverse team effort. In-house curators and digital experts collaborated with the Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office to create 3D scans and modeling. These allowed us to interpret the work in new ways and pushed us into innovative technologies and display possibilities, including augmented reality. Working with the museum’s accessibility task force further resulted in an upcoming touch- and audio-based presentation of the sculpture’s visual stories. Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration) TrackContent Chatham House RuleNo Key Outcomes valuate and prioritize collection-based narratives that lend themselves to repurposed digital delivery Strategically identify partners in the ideation, digitization, and implementation phases of an interpretive project Leverage existing assets and evergreen content to (re)contextualize collections Speakers Session Leader : Ryan King, Project Manager, Open Access, Smithsonian Institution Co-Presenter : Keith Wilson, Curator of Ancient Chinese Art, Smithsonian Freer|Sackler Museums of Asian Art Co-Presenter : Emma Stein, Curatorial Fellow for Southeast Asian Art, Smithsonian Freer|Sackler Museums of Asian Art Co-Presenter : Liz Cheng, Web Team Lead, Smithsonian Freer|Sackler Museums of Asian Art Co-Presenter : Farrokh Rezaei, Database Administrator, Smithsonian central office of IT, Smithsonian Institution

Wednesday, November 6, 2019 In 2018 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art launched a custom developed system, called the Move Object Request Application (MORA), designed to track the movement of art throughout the museum and replace a previous decade-old work order site. LACMA’s robust acquisition, loan, and exhibition calendar averages over 140,000 art location updates a year. Museum staff use the new web-based system to communicate with art preparators and collections managers about anything from gallery rotations and viewings to unpacking crates and sending objects for conservation or photography. To develop this application, the team performed extensive requirements gathering and employed an iterative, design thinking approach to the project. Rather than upgrading the previous system - with all the same assumptions - to a newer iteration, the project began with the question “What problem are we trying to solve?”. Adding to the complexity of deeply ingrained workflows and departmental dynamics was the fact that the primary user department operated in a mostly paper-based environment, which provided an opportunity for creative solutions in the usability testing stage of development. Session Type60-Minute Session (Professional Forum or Hands-on Demonstration) TrackSystems Chatham House RuleNo Key OutcomesThis session will encourage participants to think critically about the systems they have in place using key concepts in design thinking for the benefit of internal users and to apply the methodology they use for public-facing projects to their coworkers. Participants will walk away with tried-and-tested tools for paper prototyping and testing, which are especially important for implementing digital tools and workflows for visual learners and non-digital natives. Speakers Co-Presenter : Amanda Dearolph, Database Administrator, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Session Leader : Yvonne Lee, Head of Collection Information and Digital Assets, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Co-Presenter : Meredith Steinfels, Digital Platforms Manager and Archives Specialist, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth

It is important to use a secure and unique password, especially now that there are a number of people who lose their personal information and fall victim to data breaches and password leaks. To avoid this, you can take the precaution of making sure you craft strong usernames and passwords for your online accounts.Salih Ismail, Lecturer, School of IT & Engineering, Curtin University Dubail shares some pro hacks in protecting your password.About Salih IsmailSalih Ismail is an industry experienced academician who is working as a Lecturer in the School of IT and Engineering. He is currently pursuing his doctoral research in the security of cloud computing. His research interests include Cyber Security, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing and Semantic Web. He graduated with a distinction in MSc Computer Systems Management from Heriot-Watt University. He received his BSc (hons) in Information Technology from the University of Bedfordshire.Prior to academia he worked in the industry in various posts like IT Manager, Technology Officer, Database Administrator, etc. and sat on the advisory board for tech startups. He has provided consultancy to various organizations around the globe as a Penetration Tester, Forensic Investigator, and Security Consultant. He has received various awards showcasing his Excellency in Cyber Security including the prestigious Dubai Electronic Cyber Security Innovation Award.Support the show (https://www.edarabia.com/edtalk/)

Cybersecurity focuses on the various methods and techniques used to protect information and data systems. It is a field of study that combines technical and business skills such as data recovery, database applications, and systems administration to preserve the integrity of data and information systems.Salih Ismail, Lecturer, School of IT & Engineering at Curtin University, walks us through an overview of the Cybersecurity Degree - requirements, specializations, and career options for majors.Read more about the Cybersecurity Degree here: https://www.edarabia.com/what-can-you-do-cyber-security-degree/About Salih IsmailSalih Ismail is an industry experienced academician who is working as a Lecturer in the School of IT and Engineering. He is currently pursuing his doctoral research in security of cloud computing. His research interests include Cyber Security, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing and Semantic Web. He graduated with a distinction in MSc Computer Systems Management from Heriot-Watt University. He received his BSc (hons) in Information Technology from University of Bedfordshire.Prior to academia he worked in the industry in various posts like IT Manager, Technology Officer, Database Administrator etc. and sat on the advisory board for tech startups. He has provided consultancy to various organizations around the globe as a Penetration Tester, Forensic Investigator and Security Consultant. He has received various awards showcasing his Excellency in Cyber Security including the prestigious Dubai Electronic Cyber Security Innovation Award.Support the show (https://www.edarabia.com/edtalk/)

On Monday's episode we were talking about the way to avoid the many pitfalls associated with building an all star in-house analytics and data team.This shorty episode builds on this by talking about the important skillsets you must look for when hiring your first database administrator!To keep up with the podcast be sure to follow us on twitter @datacouturepod and on instagram @datacouturepodcast. And, if you'd like to help support future episodes, then consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/datacouture!Music for the show: Foolish Game / God Don't Work On Commission by spinmeister (c) copyright 2014 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/spinmeister/46822 Ft: SnowflakeSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/datacouture)

In August of 2018 we did a program entitled Developer Evolution: What's Rocking Roles in IT. That program focused primarily on the forces that are reshaping the role of the software developer. In this program we shift the focus to the DBA -- the Database Administrator -- and the evolve-or-perish choices that face those in that role. Bringing their insight to the discussion is an international panel of experts who represent years of DBA experience, and some of the forces that are transforming that role. View the complete show notes.

What Veterans Day Means to Me My Experience I joined the US Air Force in the summer of 1991 and shipped out on February of 1992. This was right at the end of Operation Desert Storm and during Desert Shield. I had been married for a year and a half and had a seven-month old daughter when I went to Basic Training. My “Why” of joining was three-fold, to further my professional life, get away from family pressures, and do something I believed in. It was an exciting time. A proud time. And a sad time. I was excited about new opportunities and the unknown. My friends and family were proud of what I was doing. Some were sad and hurt. I was somewhat conscious of all that, but the excitement of embarking on something new overrode everything else. Unexpected Turn Professionally, I thought I wanted to be a software developer. I knew that was where the industry was going and there was this wild intangible about creating something out of absolutely nothing which fascinated me. However, my ASVAB scores were not good enough and I had to settle for being a Communications Computer Operator, a 491x1 at the time. It's been reclassified a few times since then. It was a bit humbling for me and definitely disappointing, but I knew it was a foot in the door and figured I could work my way up. And I did. This is where preparation met opportunity.   Fork in the Road All this led into the opportunity I've been waiting for, in the fall of 1993, the Air Force had a huge project to consolidate all of their mainframes into the Regional Processing Centers (RPCs) and since I had shown exemplary performance and initiative, they gave me the option to either become a Systems Administrator or a Database Administrator. My career was in full blast as an IT professional and wasn't even aware of it. I just wanted to learn as much as possible and do the best job I could do. Overall, joining the military was the best professional decision I had ever made in my life. I am extremely proud of what I did and would still be serving today if I could. Lessons Learned Sacrificing for others will always pay you back ten fold. Despite my sacrifices (which were very few compared to our fighting men and women in the other services), the military had given me a set of skills that directly translated to the public sector and most of all, the pride of serving my country. Nothing can nor will ever take away that pride. Serving your country means to do the things your country asks of you without expecting anything in return. That's true about serving at any level or anything. Be proud of serving, continue to server whether or not you're in the military. "Leaving the Battlefield" story is by Chaplain Major Carlos C. Huerta USA; April 2012; https://www.army.mil/article/78562/leaving_the_battlefield_soldier_shares_story_of_ptsd   **Important Tips** - Join a movement in your area, support the troops and their families

This episode takes us through part 2 of the databases overview series.  We spend time looking at the major players in the industry and then some of the job roles typically seen in this area of technology. The Major Players We start with a tour of the most significant players in the industry.  These are almost all familiar names with IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft all in the top five.  The other names may not be new to you either.  MySQL and Postgres round out the top five.  These are solutions you need to be familiar with if you want to advance your career in this area.  You can focus on the niches, but big money in the database world is in working with these top vendor products. Database Job Roles Of course, all f this is nice to know unless you can find the right kind of job working with databases. Thus, we move next to the commonly found roles and titles for people that work in databases.  We cover a wide range of these jobs from Database Administrator to Report Writer. Great Tools We wrap up this topic with a quick tour of the tools available.  We did a broader article on these a while back.  However, the list of great tools has not changed since then.  If you are curious about any of the tools mentioned, then check out the links on that older article.

No 22º episódio do PodProgramar falaremos mais sobre uma carreira dentro da área de TI que é o Database Administrator ou DBA como muitos conhecem. O post PodProgramar #22 – Carreira de TI: DBA apareceu primeiro em Mundo Podcast.

No 22º episódio do PodProgramar falaremos mais sobre uma carreira dentro da área de TI que é o Database Administrator ou DBA como muitos conhecem. O post PodProgramar #22 – Carreira de TI: DBA apareceu primeiro em Mundo Podcast.

In our first episode we discuss the changes of the Database Administrator career, where it was and where it's going. The show notes can be found here: https://www.pythian.com/blog/datascape-podcast-episode-1-discussing-the-future-of-the-dba-career/

FEATURED GUEST:  Rev. Paul Taiwo, Executive Director of Africa Needs U (ANU), a member of Thirst No More Corporation Board of Directors Rev. Paul Taiwo is an Administrator and trained Journalist with an MS in International Development Studies from Connecticut State University in New Britain, CT and a Pre PhD in Political Economy from Howard University in Washington, D.C. Over the years he has worked as an administrator both for profit and non-profit businesses. He is a trained Information Technologist and has worked as a Database Administrator for over 10 years. Mr. Taiwo is a Minister at Hope Christian Church, Beltsville, Maryland. Armed with the word of God, he will take the gospel of love thy neighbor as yourself and pray ceaselessly, to all who will hear and heed the word of our Lord Jesus Christ. Africa Needs U (“ANU”) is a non-profit advocacy organization. Our vision is a world where majority of the people are united in the goal of a better life and development of others in the same world through increased giving. The organization was formed with the aim of encouraging a significant increase in the level of giving towards the physical and spiritual development of others around us especially in the African continent.

In this episode of AgileNEXT, Vinod Kumar joins Daniel and Stephen and talks to us about Agile, India, tech and the community. Some topics include: Agile Teams The role of tools The Indian market The Agile Community AgileNEXT Bio: vinodk https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinodkumar6 Currently an Architect at Microsoft Technology Center, Bangalore. Have been Application Developer, Database Administrator, R&D, Release cycles and Project Manager in a wide variety of SDLC. I am interested in database technologies using Cloud, Big Data, MS-SQL Server, Oracle and others. Interesting in spreading the world of technology to the community and would like to talk the right usage of technology. Also an community oriented person running the local SQL and .NET Group in Bangalore. Speaker at major conferences like TechEd, Author of books, Blogger and much more. Specialties: Competitive analysis with DB, SQL Server, BI, Reporting, ETL, Relational database features, .NET, Sharepoint, Office client Tools (Word, Outlook, PPT, Excel) etc. Worked with various customers who come to MTC Lab for debugging, performance, security architecture, scalability, deployment, tuning and other performance issues. Extensive experience in SQL Server optimization and fine-tuning. Extensive experience in End-to-End architecture design and implementation. Specialized in Big SQL Implementation, HA, DR, managing VLDB's Extensive experience making methodology and helping customers to the latest OS, SQL Server, Big Data and Cloud based solutions. Some of the areas I help customers are discussions around Consolidation of infrastructure, Application Tuning, Databases, BI, Productivity, Application Platform and Azure based Architecture designs.

Robert Ilijason is an IT Consultant specializing in databases and business intelligence, mainly working with automating processes and data flows. He has worked with customers such as Ericsson, TeliaSonera and mainly IKEA. He is also a writer. Since a few months ago, he is also a retailer and he’s opened an unmanned grocery store in the small village of Viken and now expanding in Sweden. How Robert came across our path was, in doing some research for our podcast interviews, we bucked upon this article and these videos that spoke about this gentleman in Sweden who created an automated store where there were no actual employees and all you needed was your smart phone app to basically navigate your entire experience.   Questions Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey Can you share with us a little about the problem that you were experiencing why you created this app? How would you rate customer experience in Sweden, do you find it’s different from other places in the world? How do you stay motivated every day? If another business owner came over to you and said they are looking to do something similar to what you’re doing in your business, creating an app, but are looking more to have an app to complement their existing store with employees, what is some advice you would give them in terms of developing something that would be customer oriented? What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business? What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you? What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people? Where can our listeners find your information online? What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?   Highlights Robert Ilijason stated that he has always been a tech person for all his life; he started out with computers when he was 10 years old. He started to work with it professionally when he was 20 years old and now he is 40 years old and has been with it for 20 years. He has had a lot of different titles, he has been a Web Developer, a Database Administrator, a BI Consultant, which is his current title, but what he’s been doing all these years is solving problems using technology. People go to him with a problem and he uses the correct technology to solve the problem that they have. As an avid problem solver - Robert shared that one day he had his son and he was home alone with him for the first time, he was about 6 months old back then. It was late at night, he was supposed to feed him baby food, his girlfriend had left him a note of what he was supposed to do and he managed to drop the last jar of baby food and it was too late for the stores in Viken which is a small city with about 4000 inhabitants. The stores were closed and he kind of panicked as it was his first time and he didn’t know what to do so he took his son, put him in the car and they drove to the closest city which was Helsingborg and that was a very bad experience because his son (Max) was screaming because he was both hungry and afraid and wondering what was happening and Robert was sweating all over because of the panic he had. During that trip he decided that he doesn’t want to live in a place where he can’t buy stuff all the time but his girlfriend told him that they need to stay in Viken, so he decided that if he can’t move to the store, he has to move the store to him. In Sweden it is very expensive to have personnel and in most countries, so having a 24/7 store in Viken was out of the question, at least if you have your ordinary store. Robert started thinking, what if they just remove the personnel and it proved to be quite simple because the people working in the cash register can be replaced by the customer, it’s not totally without employees because someone needs to fill up the goods and remove the old goods and clean out the store but you don’t need to have someone there all the time. You download the app, you can register online and it takes 15 seconds. You can use the app to enter the store, walk around, you scan what you take and when you’re done, you press the button and after a few weeks you get the invoice. It is a way for him to count the transaction cost because he can add credit cards or different kinds of e-payments they have in Sweden but that cost him a few Swedish quarters which is about 20 or 30 cents per transaction and by bulking up all the purchases the customer does throughout the month, he can count the transaction cost quite a lot. The app was launched in mid January of 2016. Robert stated that most people in Viken are happy that it exists. The biggest problems he has had is not with technology but with his lack of knowledge within retailing, he doesn’t understand that he needs parking spaces and he didn’t have the carts to put goods in, there were a lot of minor things that he missed and the goods on the shelves were the wrong kind but now that it’s turning around by fixing all the problems has they come along and now it’s looking well and he’s trying to expand into more villages in Sweden. Robert stated that customer service is pretty well and he mostly have that experience in many countries in Europe and they are well in the customer experience, in the northern part more so, they are calm people and try to help everyone, it’s a very helpful mentality all over so it’s pretty good. That’s why companies such as IKEA has had such a success all over the world, they figured things out and tried to make things easier for their customers even if it’s their bottom line sometimes. Robert stated that while working with IKEA, he can talk about business intelligence which is not customer service but basically collecting everything that’s happening in the stores. From the stores, from the suppliers, from the trains, boats, trucks to basically optimize the flow of goods to lower the prices to make it more available and cheaper for people, to maintain a good quality while lowering the price for customers. The data is used to provide a better experience. Most companies are using that data, if you are ever asked by a company if you are happy with an experience, you sometimes press a button or you’re answering a survey online, that’s always collected and he recommends that people do it because even if people don’t look at you’re specific answer, they look at it in an aggregate and they will identify problem points and they will be able to fix them if you help them out. If you’re not happy and don’t tell anyone, the problem won’t be fixed and that he sees in his own store because some people are very active in getting back to him and letting him know that “hey, you should really have this product or you should not sell this product and this a problem for whatever reason”, they can help him out to optimize what he has on his shelves. He has the statistics from the sales but they can also tell him “I didn’t buy cheese today because the cheese I want wasn’t there”, he would optimize it in the app so it’s very simple, you can press the button and you can either type or speak to send him information of what problems they’ve had. Robert stated that the app has everything; he tries to push everything in there so it’s easy for them and for him.  If customers have a problem in the store like purchasing something and it spoils after a day and they want to return it, do they communicate that in the app? Robert stated there is a small box in the store where you put stuff that are bad for whatever reason or you just want to return it and it informs him of that in the app. What is the response time for getting back to the customer? Robert stated that there is a call centre so it depends on when, if you do it in the middle of the night, it will take a few hours but during working hours, it’s almost immediate response but they have very few customers so it’s easy to have a high service.   Robert shared that he tries to look at the possibilities and try to be around positive people, he gets support from his family and other entrepreneurs in the area and by talking altogether they can keep each other’s spirit high so when someone is down they can always help them out to make sure they see the possibilities because it is hard to start something new and you don’t know if you’ll succeed and the costs are sometimes much higher than the money coming in. If you just prevail, you’ll most likely succeed. Robert shared that the most important advice is to start on paper and to talk to someone who actually understands user interfaces because one of the biggest challenges that he has seen when he downloads other apps is that they are very cumbersome to use, it’s confusing, they don’t always follow normal practice that most apps use and especially for bigger companies, they execute poorly. Start on paper and talk to someone that understands how the flow in the app works and do all this before you even talk to a technician. Most technicians, they think in a special way and for them things are obvious but not always obvious for the customer and an example is Apple’s Ipad, the first Ipad wasn’t better than the competition, it was worse in many regards but they managed to tell people instead of saying they have 5 gigabits, they could store 5,000 or 1,000 songs and that’s a huge difference because not everyone understands what is a gigabits it. For a technician a gigabit is obvious but for a normal person, it’s not. He sees it a lot where, you’re in the business and you understand the business and you expect everyone to understand what you’re doing but most people don’t, so you really need to start from the beginning and have someone who understands this and be a part of the app development from the very start. Robert stated that if you have a lot of notes on a professional level, Evernote is also something he uses very much. He uses all different types of cloud services like for storage such as Dropbox and OneDrive and Google Drive. Robert shared that there are many books that have had some impact on him but for this particular project, there is none. He has been influenced by a lot of American entrepreneurs and like everyone else, Steve Jobs is a person to look up to, he did a lot of good things and also Richard Branson. He also mentioned that he really appreciates Tony Fadell, he likes people who are simplifying things and if he had one topic in his life, it would be simplification, he wants to automate and simplify things so there is time for other stuff. Robert stated his excitement and focus is the expansion. It is the main part right now but what he’s mostly focusing on right now is Version 2.0, so right now to shop in his store you need to have your mobile app, you need to go into the store with the app, you need to scan the goods, you need to press to pay and the next version, you just have to have the phone in your pocket. You will go to the store, the doors will automatically open, you go in, you take whatever you want and then you just leave, after a few minutes you get a preliminary invoice which you can accept or reject and after 24 hours you get the proper invoice. So basically, you don’t need to touch the phone, it will be much simpler for the people who don’t like to use technology, it might be more simplified for the elderly, it might be that they are just not into tech and they are afraid of his store today because it’s very tech focused, you have to understand technology. Even if the app is simple, there is a barrier but he can remove the barrier. He stated that it is looking promising right now. Robert stated that listeners can find him on: www.narassar.seRobert Ilijason LinkedInRobert Ilijason Twitter Robert stated that one thing he is using from IKEA is a statement that their founder said and that is “Most things remain to be done.” It reminds him that even though he thinks something is as good as it can be, he can make it better and even though sometimes it feels like he’s stuck, there are so many things that can break it free for him. That is one quote that he is trying to think about a lot. Here is a link to visually view this unmanned Grocery Store - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShNL3oU4Mi0   Links www.narassar.se Robert Ilijason LinkedIn Robert Ilijason Twitter Evernote Dropbox OneDrive Google Drive. Robert Ilijason Unmanned Grocery Store Video

You're a Junior or mid-level Database Administrator with no obvious career path. How do you grow the right skills to level up your DBA career?

We’re all about Marcy this week. Marcy Potter is our newest team member at APFA, our Office and Database Administrator. She is an animal advocate, trained rehabilitator and an absolute machine at organizing our office, our databases and, frankly, all of us. Marcy joined Defender Radio recently to talk about her past, her future and what people need to know about finding wildlife near their homes.

This week in episode 026 I’m joined by Chris Testa-O’neill, John Martin and Andre Kamman.  Chris is a BI consultant with CoEo based in the UK, John is a Database Administrator based on the UK and Andre is a BI…Read more →

This week we have an interview an interview with Chuck Heinzelman, a SQL Server MVP.  Chuck is a Database Administrator who has been working with some of the new development oriented features of SQL Server 2008.  Chuck blogs at: http://devplanet.com/blogs/memydatabaseandi/. Show Notes Books online sparse columns guidelines (% null): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc280604.aspx Migrating to SQL Server 2008 (podcast): http://thirstydeveloper.com/2009/03/02/TheThirstyDeveloper53MigratingToSQLServer2008.aspx Download / Listen to the Show http://shows.thirstydeveloper.com/TD060.mp3 New Twitter Feed Thirsty Developer has a twitter feed, friend us at http://twitter.com/thirstyd