Category: Uncategorized

As a DBA, what do I need to learn next?

Arup Nanda did a talk on Big Data as part of the OTN APAC Tour and one of the points he made was DBAs need to get involved in all this new tech or they will get left behind and be out of a job. Someone came up to me and asked me my opinion, basically saying, “What do I need to learn next?” That’s a very difficult question to answer for a number of reasons.

The DBA job continues to evolve and you need to evolve with it. A few years ago I was able to be an Oracle database specialist. Now I need to look after SQL Server and MySQL as well. I’m also expected to know about assorted application server and web server products, as well as operating systems etc. You can’t be a specialist at everything, so as a DBA we are now forced to be generalists. What’s more, most companies don’t really want a specialist anymore. They want someone that can turn their hand to anything. The role will almost certainly include some of these big data pieces as we move forward.

Do a bit of Googling and you will see the Hadoop ecosystem is huge. There are loads of pieces from loads of projects and they are all changing rapidly. The chances are, what you learned 2 years ago has been almost completely replaced now. This is often the case when something “new” comes to the forefront. Over time things evolve, some projects win and some projects lose. Eventually things stabilise and life gets a little easier. This is not to say you shouldn’t get involved now, but just remember it is a moving target. Everything you learn about it will be useful, but not necessarily exactly what you need for your next project.

I’m not a big data guy, so my opinion is rather uneducated, but following on from the previous points, it seems to me there is no such thing as a “big data expert”. You probably need to be a “big data generalist”, that doesn’t know everything about any of the pieces, but knows enough about each of them to string them together to do something useful. This is an important skill in itself.

As for me personally, my website is a reflection of one part of my work life. The Oracle bit. I have an ever growing to-do list that is mostly made up of Oracle stuff, but also includes big data, docker, IoT and …

It’s difficult enough to keep on top of the stuff you need for your day job, not to mention the new stuff needed to position yourself for the future. So when you ask me, “What do I need to learn next?”, I will probably answer, “When you find out, can you please tell me?” 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Amsterdam to Zeist

I had a lazy morning, then it was time to start the journey to Zeist. It was a pretty straight forward journey from Amsterdam Central, via Utrecht to Driebergen-Zeist station. I had planned to get a bus from Driebergen-Zeist station to the hotel, but looking on the map it was only a couple of miles so I walked it. It was a little annoying dragging my suitcase, but no big drama. You can check out the journey and the hotel in the video below.

I had a quick walk around part of the town, near the hotel, where I bumped into my new stepmom.

In the evening I got a message from Dad asking if I wanted to go out to a family dinner. It was just as you would expect. Me crying and screaming, “You can’t tell me what to do, you’re not my mother!” and her saying, “I’m not trying to replace your mother. I just want to be friends!” I got back to my hotel room to find some brochures for posh, but secluded boarding schools. I’m not sure what I should be thinking at this point…

Tomorrow I’m speaking at the OGH Oracle DBA and SQL Celebration Day. Dad is doing the keynote and my new stepmom is going to visit some relatives that live near. I have a sneaking suspicion it’s going to be like “The Princess Diaries” and she will find she’s actually next in line to the Dutch Throne. Does that make me a step-prince?

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Tour of Latin America 2015 : It’s a Wrap!

ace-director

I just realised I didn’t write a closing post for the OTN Tour of Latin America 2015, so here goes.

Here are the links to all the posts I wrote during the two weeks that related to the main body of the tour.

Here are the links to the posts I wrote during the little trip to Machu Picchu.

Overall it was a really fun tour. Ignoring my illness at Machu Picchu, I think I coped a lot better with it than I have the previous couple of tours, which was good news.

Big thanks to the organisers and attendees at all the events. I hope to see you all again soon! Thanks also to the ACE Program for giving me the opportunity to fly the flag! I must also say a thank you to my fellow speakers for putting up with me for all that time. I know I can be hard work, so you are all deserving of an “I survived a tour with Tim”, badge, if one existed. 🙂

Sorry for the delay in writing this post! See you soon!

Cheers

Tim…

MOVOBall : Kickstarter

movoballThis morning I went to the launch event for MOVOBall, an invention by one of my (In Real Life) friends Steve Priestnall. The event was held at the Electric Cinema in town.

It was kind-of fun to see the name up outside the cinema.

cinema

I’ve kept the ticket as a memento.

ticket

Later this month they will be launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the product development.

deviceSo what is it? It’s a neat little device to make using a swiss ball a lot more fun. You can either put your mobile device into the cradle, or use a MOVOBug to talk to your phone. It uses the motion detectors in the phone, or MOVOBug, to detect the motion of the ball, so it can be used as a game controller or to interact with fitness apps.

ballI can imagine Noel Portugal and the AppsLab folks coming up with some party piece at OpenWorld using this. Maybe MOVOBall controlled Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots. 🙂

When the Kickstarter film is released I’ll put a link to it. It’s pretty fun, especially the outtakes at the end.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Here is the Kickstarter URL.

Fedora 20 : Upgrade from Fedora 19

It’s a little over a month since Fedora 20 was released, but during a terrible bout of insomnia last night I decided to upgrade my desktop PC.

The upgrades using “fedup” worked fine for the previous releases (Fedora 18, Fedora 19). Unfortunately, it failed abysmally for the upgrade to Fedora 20. I tried a few times, but I was not able to troubleshoot it, so I gave up and did a reinstall.

I’ve got an SSD for the system drive, but keep almost everything of importance on a second drive (and a backup drive). I tend to do most things in VMs, so I ended up doing the following:

  • Backup.
  • Copy a few config files to the second drive (smb.conf, hosts, fstab etc).
  • Clean installation on the SSD, not touching the second drive.
  • Put the mount information back into the “/etc/fstab” and mount the second drive.
  • Put the “/etc/hosts” file back in place and install dnsmasq.
  • Put the “smb.conf” file back in place and start samba.
  • Do a “yum update -y” and reboot.
  • Install some utilities, like UltraEdit, VirtualBox, DropBox and Chrome etc.
  • Open up the existing VMs on the second drive using the newly installed VirtualBox.
  • Backup.

That was pretty much it really. I’m, back up and running with a clean OS installation and I guess it took less than an hour from start to finish. I think in future I’ll avoid upgrades. There’s something nice about a sparkly new installation, without any of the old crap left hanging around.

During the installation, I picked MATE as my desktop. I’ve tried the others and this is the one that feels the most natural to me.

Cheers

Tim…

LAOTN Tour (Southern Leg) : ArOUG Day 2…

I was determined to get on a bus tour of Buenos Aires this morning. The plan was to do this yesterday, then spend this morning revisiting a few parts of the city in a bit more detail. Unfortunately, my inability to follow basic directions scuppered that plan… 🙂

So this morning I got myself to the tour bus and rode the loop of the city, taking photos as I went. You will see lots of blurred images and lots of pictures containing parts of the bus, but I don’t care because they are still good memories. 🙂

I got back from the tour bus, had a quick shower, then walked to the conference venue to do my last presentation of the ArOUG event. Everything went smoothly and people seemed really happy with it. I got to speak to more of the attendees, which is always fun, and pose for a bunch of photos with people. Everyone in Latin America has such nice skin tones, then there is me looking like casper the friendly ghost next to them. I think I will get a fake tan before I come next time. 🙂

After saying goodbyes to a few people, a few of us went out to a local bar to toast the end of another event. Alex would be proud of me, as I drank a pint of the local equivalent on Guinness, while eating chips (fries) with a cocktail stick. What a great idea! No sticky fingers. 🙂

I’m now back at the hotel and I leave for Sa0 Paulo, Brazil tomorrow. That’s four out of five events done. It hardly seems real…

Thanks to everyone in Buenos Aires and the ArOUG that looked after me and made me feel welcome during my stay. I hope to see you again soon. Also thanks to the Oracle ACE Program for making this happen.

Cheers

Tim…

LAOTN Tour (Southern Leg) : ArOUG Day 1…

I arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina late last night. The ferry ride from Montevideo took about 3 hours.

This morning I got a taxi to the ArOUG conference venue and did my first presentation of the conference. I was originally scheduled to do both my presentations today, then have tomorrow off, but Alex Gorbachev needs to leave earlier tomorrow, so I’ve swapped slots with him and my second presentation is now tomorrow afternoon.

Feeling adventurous, I decided to walk back from the conference venue. The directions seemed pretty straight forward, but I managed to get myself lost. I walked around for quite a while, thinking I must be close to the hotel, but not managing to find it. I eventually decided the only way to get back was to get a taxi. As I walked to find one, I noticed I was standing next to my hotel. Bonus!

The plan was to spend the afternoon on a city tour bus, but unfortunately I got lost on the way to the pickup point and I just walked around for a few hours until I found myself again, standing next to the hotel. 🙂

After reading a bunch of security messages from Oracle I felt quite nervous of taking photos and making myself look even more like a tourist, so I didn’t take many photos. If I can get on the bus tour tomorrow, and not get lost again, I will take loads.

In the evening went out to a barbecue-style place to eat. Everyone ate a little bit of salad and fish to start, then guys brought a procession of different meat out on large skewers, more like swords really, then it was a meat-fest for the rest of the night. I’m a vegetarian, so I kept eating the veggie stuff while I watched a herd of assorted animals get devoured. Everyone was very happy and full by the end of it. Even so, Alex still managed to eat some food from a street vendor on during the walk back to the hotel. I have no idea where he puts it all! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

How to Change the WordPress Table Prefix

Assuming my current WordPress prefix was “wp_” and I wanted to change it to “banana_”, then I would do the following…

Take a backup of your database and file system. Remember, if you screw up and trash your blog you will thank yourself for the extra time you spent doing this!

Amend the “$table_prefix” setting in the “wp-config.php” file.

$table_prefix = 'banana_'; // Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!

Rename all the tables, swapping the “wp_” prefix with “banana_”. For example, the following statement would rename the “wp_comments” table to “banana_comments”.

RENAME TABLE wp_comments TO banana_comments

Perform the following updates.

UPDATE banana_options SET option_name = 'banana_user_roles' WHERE option_name = 'wp_user_roles'
UPDATE banana_usermeta SET meta_key = 'banana_capabilities' WHERE meta_key = 'wp_capabilities'
UPDATE banana_usermeta SET meta_key = 'banana_user_level' WHERE meta_key = 'wp_user_level'
UPDATE banana_usermeta SET meta_key = 'banana_autosave_draft_ids' WHERE meta_key = 'wp_autosave_draft_ids'

If you don’t do these updates, the blog will work, but when you try to access the admin site you will be greeted with a message saying,

You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.

That’s it!

Cheers

Tim…

Fedora 16, Nouveau Driver and GNOME 3…

I did an update of the my Fedora 16 machines this morning and I’ve got GNOME 3 back in full effect, rather than the fallback option. It seems the updated Nouveau Driver was included in the update, so I don’t have to wait for Fedora 17 to get me back on GNOME shell, and I won’t be requiring software rendering of GNOME shell when I do upgrade. Happy days…

Cheers

Tim…