Been awhile

Sorry all.. well all 12 of you regular readers :) Statscounter says I have 12 readers that come back and about 130 a week on average visits. Not great, but I am not that entertaining. I don’t know if that counts RSS etc, so I have my fingers crossed there are more of you out there. It has been a busy time at work and at home, preparation for upcoming holidays and a plethora of new databases coming online has been consuming most of my time. The mass exodus from blogger by many people of late has made me wonder if I missed a memo someplace J. I have been consumed with reading all about DW databases as our big DW is about to almost quadruple in size as the user community has asked for and received approval for much more data to be loaded for reporting purposes. We will actually have to buy more disks for our brand new SAN that was supposed to last until the end of 2007 without any expansion. The DW is going to be almost 4 terabytes of data soon. I know, not big, but big enough for me. I have been using ‘off time’ at work to setup a proper oracle based training environment. This has become a pet project of mine and I am enthusiastic at how it is progressing. Thank goodness for VM! We had a VM server that we were upgrading as it was undersized, the cost to upgrade it was only a few dollars short of a new server, so we ordered a new server and the existing VM was given to me… minus a few hundred gigabytes of storage, but still a wonderful “gift” from the system admin folks. I spent a few hours configuring a VM client with suse, fully patched oracle 10g2, apex and some other tidbits of internal stuff installed, and then copied it to 4 other clients, giving me a total of 5 I can configure at will. The first one has been setup with just the example schema’s and I have written up a training doc for an introduction to SQL, a short 2 hour seminar which is almost 100% hands on. I set up an intermediate level SQL seminar also, 2 hours as well. Which I have configured so that I show the basics of things like some analytics and writing SQL for indexes instead of writing indexes for SQL and other things like that. The trainee’s each have a user account with everything they need and they have the ability to connect from their work PC’s after the seminar’s are over so they can reference what they did in the seminar and redo the training to focus on area’s they missed. This is based on the outcome of me being asked to train our already trained people with more detail and depth. So far I have only “trained” a few senior people and myself many many, many times as I write the seminars so I can target what we (the company) wants them to know and understand. I probably won’t be able to train the masses until September. No replacement for professional based training of course, but as a VP said – Hey its “free”. I had been working on a “what not to do” seminar, but I see that Tom Kyte has come up with the same idea. So I guess I will have to make sure I don’t make it seem like I am plagiarizing him.