Author: jim.czuprynski

As part of Tech Field Days Cloud Field Day last week, I spent a whole day at the Google Cloud Moffett Place campus in Sunnyvale, CA to experience what I can only describe as drinking from an information firehose as our Googler hosts explain everything Google Cloud enables – file / block / object storage, application workloads, databases, virtual machines, and even bare metal computing.

Our gracious Googler host Bobby Allen brought together an impressive team of presenters and sessions that delved deeply into the underlying infrastructure needed to make the future demands of Generative AI a reality. One of his “Bobbyisms” helped me to keep focused during the in-depth sessions and discussions:

AI is not The Thing – AI Is the thing that makes The Thing Better.

In other words, GenAI is not really brand-new – after all, we’ve had machine learning for well over a decade, and LLMs have been around for some time as well. However, some things like prompt engineering, hallucinations, and the almost-human conversational capabilities of GenAI are quite recent developments.

So how does a major IT organization like Google build offerings for DevOps that combines neos and kainos?

Computing horsepower, in both bare metal or virtual flavors

For starters, Google Cloud offers a plethora of virtual and bare metal machines to provide the horsepower needed to run AI workloads along the DevOps spectrum, featuring Intel and AMD chipsets and various memory configurations for those demands.

Wait … What’s a TPU?

One interesting innovation that Google Cloud has brought to the GenAI party is the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a bundle of hardware components designed specifically to handle the rigors of AI computing demands.

Unlike GPUs, TPUs are a combination of shared memory and powerful CPUs tightly coupled together via extremely fast inter-chip interconnects (ICIs) within a three-dimensional “pod.” GenAI applications leverage a smaller 3D “cube” – a portion of a TPU – when they need to perform complex mathematical processing at the heart of many GenAI algorithms. (You can find out more about the v5p TPU here.)

Corpus chunks take up a lot of space. Where do we put it?

The storage requirements for enterprise data needed to make GenAI practical are obviously demanding, especially for cloud-based databases where that data resides. The next generation of Google Cloud block storage – Hyperdisk – is designed for those demands and comes in three flavors depending on the workloads being facilitated.

AI HyperComputer: The ties that bind

Powerful computing through GPUs and TPUs and optimized storage like Hyperdisk would be useless for GenAI workloads unless they’re able to communicate via ultra-fast, resilient networks. Google calls this architecture their AI Hypercomputer.

This is crucial for GenAI implementations because they often leverage Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to distribute workloads – whether it’s initial model training, testing, inference, fine-tuning, or even actual prompts and responses.

Google built a resilient network that can also intelligently offload workload demands throughout the architecture so that those hungry GPUs can be continually fed their required data inputs across multiple streams while insuring they can recombine their results as transformation occurs on separate GKE nodes.

Not Just Verbal: Multi-Modal Inputs for AI

One of the most intriguing demonstrations at Google Cloud from Neama Dadkhahnikoo was their latest multi-modal toolset that can interface with just about any type of input and output modality to leverage generative AI. Google showed off its latest Gemini toolset that provides some pretty spectacular capabilities on this playing field.

An actual example: A chatbot was asked to scan a movie to find a specific event, and the result came back in just a few seconds.

Another demo showed a Googler walking around an office with Google Glasses on and asking the AI to perform inferences based on images in focus. One intriguing example: A whiteboard sketch showing a live cat, a dead cat, and an open box. When asked What meme does this remind you of? the chatbot almost immediately replied Schroedinger’s Cat.

What I found especially reassuring is that Google Cloud hasn’t ignored the concerns many of us old-school data engineers have about the underlying data we need to collect as part of our AI applications’ corpus and training data, including ownership of our data within their Cloud.

Building ChatBots With Google CloudRun and LangChain

Tying all this infrastructure and AI-empowering concepts together, Lisa Shen did a fantastic job to demonstrate how Google CloudRun enables rapid development and deployment of GenAI endpoints that end users can access to immediately leverage the application logic. (I’m actually in the midst of building an APEX-based chatbot within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for a similar LangChain demo for an upcoming session at Oracle Cloud World 2024, so this demo felt like familiar territory.)

Python is a favorite DevOps tool to for interfacing with LangChain to build GenAI apps, of course, but sensitive in-house business data needs to be stored somewhere … so I was glad to see the shout-out for Cloud SQL as a repository.

With sufficient Google Cloud documentation as a pertinent corpus, this simple GenAI Cloud Run example endpoint was able to return respectable answers to several sample prompts during the demo … with coding time of just a few minutes:

GenAI and Goodput

One thread that ran through almost every Google Cloud session about GenAI: the concept of goodput. With the complexity of the components that must work well together all the time to provide optimal results whenever a model is being built, trained, tested, and eventually used, it’s an interesting way of measuring just how well every aspect of a GenAI system is performing.

Oh, One More Thing …

And a final perspective as a 20+ year Oracle DBA: Oracle has recently updated its licensing terms for database instances on GCP, so I’m intrigued to see how an adventurous IT shop might leverage Google Cloud’s infrastructure for their next GenAI DevOps efforts with an Oracle database or two under the covers.

Just wanted to give everyone who saw my prior blog post from Tech Field Day’s recent Edge Field Day #2 gathering some interesting news about one of our presenters, StorMagic. They’ve recently made public their new tool called Edge Control that’s a reasonably-priced and simple tool for managing and configuring storage and hardware at the far edges of an edge computing environment.

We saw a brief demo of Edge Control back at EFD2 a few weeks back. It’s got a simple and clean front end that lets you quickly identify all the storage devices, VMs, and other hardware within your edge computing universe and list them by IP address, component name, or just about any other meaningful attribute.

It’s also easy to configure an individual component as well as initiate updates of the component’s firmware – something that is normally a time-consuming, error-prone, and mindless task. What impressed me most about what we briefly saw was the simplicity:

The tasks we typically need to accomplish when managing an edge computing environment don’t necessarily need a complex UI as long as it satisfies the immediate needs at hand.

The team at StorMagic have some brief videos of what they presented to us at EFD #2, so have a look-see; it might be the reasonably-price solution you’ve been looking for.

Edge Control release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlLs_qRykjs
Edge Control live demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmJLr4qt5YU

Edge computing continues evolving exponentially, and it’s never been more obvious after I served as a delegate for Gestalt IT’s Edge Field Day #2 (EFD2) in Santa Clara, CA. After returning home from Oracle Cloud World 2023 in Las Vegas just a few weeks back – more on my experiences here – I had the chance to catch up with Stephen Foskett’s team at GestaltIT and with many of my fellow delegates from past Tech Field Day events.

We had two solid days of presentations from three vendors who focus on providing all the resources that modern IT operations need for their edge computing needs. I found it particularly refreshing that each vendor took completely different approaches to solving the atypical challenges of modern edge computing.

Solidigm: Computing At the Edge Means More Data Locally

The team from Solidigm led off our event. I’d already heard about their offerings as a delegate at Storage Field Day #24, but it was interesting to see how they pivoted their technology pitch towards the Edge. One evident key trend is that as edge computing resources continue to grow more powerful, more analytics are happening closer to the edge.

Thus, more data is being collected, preprocessed, filtered, analyzed for relevance, and retained locally for eventual transport to centralized data centers. Solidigm already offers high-capacity SSD storage solutions, but they’ve also created purpose-built endpoint servers that can provide edge computing capabilities to handle this new paradigm.

We also heard quite a bit about how Solidigm has creatively evaluated the robustness and survivability of their SSDs through some great stories on testing them in extreme situations, including a railcar bed, attached to a bowling pin, and even – how appropriate, as the 2023 World Series draw near! – during a pickup baseball game.

StorMagic: Can I Get a Witness?

The StorMagic folks focused on different set of real-world edge computing challenges: how to keep all the nodes on the Edge communicating with each other in small-scale settings without breaking the bank to keep them synchronized. That’s often harder than it sounds and potentially quite expensive – especially for, say, a moderately-sized additive manufacturing facility with a smaller IT budget than its fully-capitalized counterpart.

That’s where StorMagic’s SvSAN solution shows potential: It needs only two servers in its cluster per location, and provides concurrency within the cluster through their Witness as Service component. During their live demonstration, that witness role was fulfilled by a Raspberry Pi – a considerably inexpensive and lightweight component that prevents split-brain syndrome within the cluster.

StorMagic’s offering thus appears priced attractively for SMBs – potentially within a $10K upper limit when factoring in reasonably resilient hardware. It also comes with a simple client UI for deploying and managing the cluster’s networking and hardware that’s useful for deploying applications and upgrades across the enterprise.

NodeWeaver: The Edge Ain’t Beanbag.

Showing off their bare-metal nanocloud concept designed specifically for modern edge computing, the folks from NodeWeaver focused on some stern realities of deploying, monitoring, and upgrading edge devices as well as the applications they run.

NodeWeaver definitely brought their A-game to EFD2, including a full-blown server and several different edge devices for us delegates to experiment with. The smallest of these relied on ATOM technology, so we’re not talking about super-powerful devices here. However, that wasn’t the point of what they showed us; instead, their technology is concentrated on handling some tough realities of edge computing, including the need to deploy networking and applications across a wide variety of diverse devices running a variety of operating systems.

I had the chance to observe an example of a typical NodeWeaver deployment to multiple devices, and even experiment with a tiny nano-node. Since I’ve seen my share of unexpected hardware and networking failures over the years, I decided to have some fun as well. To simulate what could happen purely by accident in a real-world office environment, I deployed my dreaded PCL test: I unplugged the node’s power cord halfway through the configuration.

As the NodeWeaver folks explained, their nano-cloud solution is designed to recover automatically in this scenario. Indeed, I did receive notification via email that although the initial configuration attempt had failed, it was resuming at an appropriate checkpoint; it eventually completed the configuration within a matter of minutes. That’s crucial, of course, for alleviating serious heartburn when deploying radically different devices, perhaps half a continent away.

(PCL, by the way, stands for Polish Cleaning Lady. They are standard issue in most Chicagoland office buildings. They are friendly, hard-working, and devoted to clean office spaces, so they aren’t afraid to unplug a device if it gets in the way of any cleanup task. This actually happened to one of my mentors many years ago; he still uses that story to explain how an Oracle database performs complete recovery after an unexpected instance termination.)

Ignite Sessions: Our Turn!

I also had a new Tech Field Day experience: Stephen Foskett offered several delegates a chance to show off our presenting chops. My colleagues and I talked about a plethora of topics: biases to beware in generative AI, the difficulties of security within edge computing, and even how to build your own chatbot leveraging retrieval augmented generation.

Those of you who’ve seen me present at conferences know how much I love entertaining my audience while trying to impart some new ways of looking at things, and I hope they enjoyed my bit of fun as much as I did showing my new it. (Spoiler alert: Beware the Forer Effect.)

EFD #2: Wrapping It Up …

I’ve yet to attend a Tech Field Day event that didn’t expand my brain, and EFD2 gave me plenty of new use cases, technology, and business risks to ponder – something I’ll definitely use to my advantage as I’m preparing new presentations for upcoming meetups and conferences. And I’m still hoping we can pull together a Data Field Day themed event sometime in 2024. With the incredible changes we’re seeing in our industry as vector databases and generative AI become mainstream topics, there have got to be plenty of new service providers who’d love to tell their story.

It’s been over a week since I got back from Oracle Cloud World 2023 in Las Vegas, and it’s taken me that long to process and digest everything that happened there. Along the way, I presented three times and sat for some brief interviews on Oracle technology. And even though Gen AI could write this, here’s my personally-authored take on what I experienced.

A Much Bigger Crowd.

It was impossible to ignore much higher attendance at OCW23, just based on human traffic throughout the venue.

We had over 100 Oracle ACEs at our dinner, a first since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was encouraging to see so many Oracle product managers and executives recognizing our contributions to the Oracle community.

Generative AI Is Ubiquitous.

Larry Ellison’s keynote focused on Generative AI (GenAI for short) and its impending impact on our civilization. Oracle is determined not to be left behind in the race, either. Larry announced they’re building the world’s largest computer based on NVIDIA H100 GPUs. I had a chance to chat with the NVIDIA folks at their OCW23 booth and actually touch some of that hardware – impressive stuff!

Larry also mentioned Oracle APEX as the target IDE for no-code development and how tightly it’s integrated into Oracle Database. I was surprised to hear that Java is no longer the target language for application development. When I chatted with folks at the Oracle Health Conference, they acknowledged how crucial APEX has been for transforming Cerner applications as part of that vertical.

I frankly do not know how many jobs will be replaced by GenAI, but I do know this: Everyone who asks me if their job is in danger because of it are the same people who asked me in the past (since I’m an IT guy) if I can fix their printer. The answer in both cases is probably … no.

Meanwhile, Back In the Trenches …

I was happy to hear Juan Loaiza emphasize some of the real-life DevOps dilemmas in his keynote on Oracle 23c. Juan explained at length how features like JSON Relational Duality offer the best of both worlds. The ability to access a JSON document as if it was stored within a relational database is a powerful fusion of two methods of data representation (more on that below). And the addition of vector database capabilities in 23c makes it more attractive than ever as a central platform for all of an IT organization’s computing needs.

A Hunger for Learning.

For the first time ever, I had three sessions at Oracle Cloud World. Two of those sessions were aimed at getting folks ready to experiment with LiveLab sessions right afterwards. They took place right on the main exhibition floor in a theater setting.

I had to talk fast to fit all content into 20 minutes! It was reassuring to see folks stop in their tracks to learn about APEX Native Map Regions and Oracle 23c’s most promising new feature, JSON Relational Duality.

The good news is you can experience what they experienced: Both of these sessions are publicly available. You can try out the diverse feature set of Native Map Regions or experiment with JSON Relational Duality Views at no cost through Oracle’s LiveLabs portal. Be sure to drop me a note if you have any questions afterwards.

My final session of Wednesday was late in the afternoon, not long before the big party was due to start. Yet a handful of people did show up for my session that took a deeper look at JSON Relational Duality in Oracle 23c. For me, that was a new experience because for the first time ever, all my attendees were people of color.

Even better, for the first time in my life I met two colleagues who’d travelled over 10,000 miles from Zambia to attend OCW23. That was a humbling experience in itself – I can’t imagine being that hungry for new knowledge. I made sure to mention how the Oracle ACE Program could make a difference in their careers, and I hope they may one day join our ranks of seasoned professionals.

If you’ve followed me on social media, you probably have already heard that Beyond Tech Skills, the podcast I co-hosted since January 2021 with my colleague and excellent friend Liron Amitzi, just wrapped up our final episode. While that’s unfortunate – especially for our loyal listeners, whom we appreciate immensely! – we had an amazing journey producing over 50 episodes since early 2021.

Let’s Do a Podcast! So … What Will We Talk About?

Liron and I met up at an Oracle user conference where we were both guest speakers, and we instantly bonded over our similar sense of humor. Our backgrounds couldn’t have been more different: I’m an early Boomer born and bred in Chicago, Illinois, and he’s a Millennial living in Vancouver, BC but is originally from Israel. We’d discussed collaborating sometime when the opportunity arose, so faced with the depths of the COVID pandemic in late 2020 and stuck at home with no in-person events or travel in the foreseeable future, we jumped at the chance to try something different. At least it wouldn’t be boring!

Once we built some podcasting infrastructure, we had to decide what to talk about. We dove into what many people were still struggling with: how to best position their technical skills and – more importantly – their so-called “soft skills” when looking for new employment opportunities. Our podcast’s title materialized naturally from those first few episodes because we wanted our listeners to realize just how differentiating those skills could be in those crazy times. We started simply with discussions on what our combined 60 years of IT experience had taught us: how to prepare a CV or a resume, how to handle trick questions during tech interviews, and even how to do tech interviews when hiring someone.

Let’s Talk to Our Smart(er) Friends!

Almost on a whim, one of us suggested we try interviewing some of our colleagues and friends we’d met over the years at technical conferences and user group meet-ups over the past 10 years. We started that part of the journey rather boldly with an extended and delightful chat with our good friend and colleague Kellyn Gorman about the challenges women still face today in the IT world.

We got such a great response from that interview that we decided we’d continue the conversational tone of the podcast, so we remained on the lookout for interesting guests and topics. We interviewed dozens of people in 2021 and 2022, including some of our more gregarious acquaintances like Connor McDonald, who talked at length about how to give great presentations at conferences, and Rie Merritt, who is responsible for wrangling hundreds of advocates in the Microsoft MVP program.

Along the way, we figured out some secrets about interviewing people. The key thing to remember is that your guest is most interested in talking about their own experiences, so it really pays to research what they’ve done recently, and find at least a few things about them that even their closest friends and colleagues didn’t know.

You Never Can Tell What People Find Most Interesting

Another surprise for us was that it’s often impossible to tell exactly which guest, discussion, or topic will prove to be most popular with our audience. Our especially lively discussion with Mark Horstman, who created the popular Manager Tools(TM) toolset to help managers at all levels communicate effectively with their teams, turned out to be one of our most download episodes.

Was this due to fortunate timing of the imminent diminishment of the pandemic? Were struggling managers at their wits’ end to handle the onset of #WFH / #RTO hybrid work environments? We’re still not sure, but it definitely resonated with a lot of listeners.

And our conversation with our colleague Jessica Sharp – herself an early Millennial – about the differences between Boomers, GenXers, Millennials, and GenZers and our (actually, not so) different outlooks on work was another surprise as a one of our most popular episodes. Was it the title (OK, Boomer. Seriously, It’s OK) or was it our witty repartee? Again, we’re not 100% sure. But it we certainly had an absolutely hilarious time recording it.

How Are You Doing … Today?

It was impossible to ignore how many people were struggling with their personal mental health during the pandemic, so we sought out folks who knew how best to address those issues. We chatted with Dr. Ryan Todd, whose popular Beyond the Checkbox podcast focuses on the stressors that so many of us face even in these post-pandemic times. Another fascinating guest, Rob Stephenson, told us how he created his own mobile app to help himself and others deal with severe depression and manage bipolar symptoms.

Wait … You Know Who?

We were extremely fortunate to chat with Tim Goldstein from Google, who told us the fascinating tale of how he handled his diagnosis of Aspergers late in life and how he actually turned it to his advantage. And our connection with Tim led us to a most unexpected opportunity to talk at length with one of the Fathers of the Internet, Dr. Vinton Cerf, winner of the Turing Award and still active in IT. (You think you have networking issues? Dr. Cerf is actually working on the interplanetary internet.)

It’s Not Over Until It’s Over

Late in 2022, Liron found a new career opportunity that required him to move his entire family to Tel Aviv, Israel – a bold relocation that I cannot ever imagine making! – but we continued to search out guests, schedule interviews, and maintain the quality of our episodes, shifting to monthly instead of biweekly episode drops.

Even with that adjustment, the eight-hour time zone difference made it ever more difficult for both of us to align our schedules, especially when we needed to interview guests in the western USA. We reluctantly agreed to wrap up our podcast, but we were determined to finish on a strong note.

In our last few episodes, our guest Tiffany Teasley related her inspiring story on how she decided to become a data scientist after 20 years as a high school mathematics teacher. And our final episode featured Dr. Douglas Scherer, who talked about how organizations need to improve their employee engagement strategy if they have any hope of retaining key human capital.

Lessons Learned: You Miss All the Shots You Don’t Take

In retrospect, co-hosting a podcast offered me the chance to learn some amazing lessons I would never have experienced had I not taken the shot:

• Preparation is crucial. Podcasting is more than talking to each other or asking the obvious question; the best episode moments happened when we queried a guest about some part of their lives that they are rarely asked about.
• Recording is easy, but editing is hard. Especially under a deadline!
• Finally, listening is the most important soft skill. I had to really focus on my co-host and guest when they were talking, because we often hit upon an unexpected topic or story organically while recording, and some of our most interesting episodes were the result.

I’ve finally had a chance to catch my breath from the last few weeks – I’ve been planning out some new Oracle meetup events in the Chicagoland area, and in between all that I’ve been working on learning about and experimenting with the latest public release of Oracle Database 23c – so it’s been like standing on tiptoe in a wave pool with the water lapping just beneath my nose.

But just before all the craziness started, I had a chance to serve as a delegate for Gestalt IT’s Storage Field Day #25 (SFD25) in Millbrae, CA, just a stone’s throw from San Francisco International (SFO). We split our time between the kitschy Aloft hotel for lodging but did our conference at the Westin San Francisco just across the way. It was a great chance to catch up with Stephen Foskett’s team at GestaltIT and with many of my fellow delegates from past Tech Field Day events.

After an interesting flight through a bomb cyclone circling SFO like the drain in Psycho, our pilot terminated his final approach and we found ourselves headed to Sacramento to wait out the storm … only to have severe weather cause yet another delay. (Yeah, I know. First World Problems.)

I eventually arrived rain-soaked five hours late, but ready for two solid days of presentations from four keys vendors who focus specifically on the most-often ignored aspect of modern computing environments: where we keep our organization’s data to insure its maximum availability, accessibility, and security.

From my perspective, two major themes dominated our vendors’ messages: the ever-expanding horizon of new storage components that system reliability engineer professionals need to comprehend to prepare for those new capabilities, and the ever-encroaching threat of ransomware upon IT organizations, including the need to aggressively plan in advance to protect their data’s security as well as the survivability of their critical infrastructure once an attack ensues.

Index Engine: Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

The team at Index Engine offered the most compelling presentation of the conference. We all hear daily about the threat of ransomware; this morning, in fact, a new exploit by [add appropriate one here] exposed a major organization to an embarrassing security failure.

Index Engine essentially stated there’s only two states of storage security postures today: Either you’re already infected with malware and you’re responding to that threat, or you just don’t know you’ve been infected yet, but you’ll discover it sometime soon, and then you’ll be forced to respond to the threat, most likely at a most inopportune time.

What surprised me (and admittedly shook me to my core) was the sophistication of the storage system attacks that the Index Engine folks described, including exploits like encrypting only selected sectors (for lack of a better term, seeing everything is SSD now) of LUNs or mount points. I could imagine a situation where that corruption was intelligently positioned against the oldest partitions of an Oracle database’s partitioned table, which means it could be weeks or months before a query against those blocks was detected.

I also found it fascinating that their CyberSense tool leverages machine learning models to detect ever-more-sophisticated patterns of storage encryption strategies typically deployed by ransomware purveyors – an extremely relevant application of ML and analytics that bodes well for any company employing their solution. Ransomware attacks aren’t going away, so it’s good to know someone’s accepting the challenge to detect, mitigate, and defeat them.

StorPool: The Newcomers From Bulgaria.

I’d only just recently heard about StorPool from a completely unexpected recent encounter: I’d detected them while looking for some new vendors who might be interested in sponsoring our upcoming ODTUG Kscope23 event in June in Aurora, CO. Hailing from Bulgaria – which their team described as the original Soviet Silicon Valley (!?!) – they have a long history of building complex, performant storage systems.

They’d taken advantage of Gestalt IT’s offer to review their presentations ahead of time, and it showed. Their presentation team gave us a rather rollicking look at their most recent storage offerings, including a deep dive into some real-world performance comparisons (see above) – something I wish more presenters weren’t resistant to providing us delegates.

Most of all, I appreciated that they acknowledged the fact most of us still working as SREs, our focus is really on storage stability: of course, we expect performant, reliable, and easy-to-manage storage platforms, but we’re also under constant pressure to maintain the costs behind all that “plumbing.” Their solutions offered some hope that it’s actually possible to achieve that even while contemplating an ever-expanding need to store everything (including audit trails and network logs) because for all we know, somebody is going to need that sometime in the future.

AWS: Room.Elephant.1

Of course, Amazon Web Services was one of the two elephants in the room (more on the biggest one in just a minute). So many organizations use AWS file, object, and block storage these days – many without really knowing exactly how much they’re utilizing because of the nature of shadow IT projects. (And yeah – that’s still a thing.)

AWS acknowledged that keeping everything working and everybody happy means we occasionally need to simulate a worst-case scenario should a failure occur … and that’s why they’ve introduced the concept of chaos engineering into their EBS storage systems. And as an admittedly old-school DBA, I’m usually focused on my database backups’ resiliency; however, what’s really scary to contemplate is what would happen if my IT organization lost even a fraction of its latest and legacy application code and configuration files? It’s good to see that AWS recognizes this reality for those of us on the front lines and that they’re actively protecting over an exabyte (that’s a boatload!) of application data through their AWS Backup tools.

IBM: Room.Elephant.2

I hate to admit it, but the team from IBM posted the least informative and entertaining presentation of the whole event. Their sales points were either lackluster or self-aggrandizing, and even in some cases quite unbelievable (as in that IBM is the #1 Data Foundation for Kubernetes environments).

And is there some kind of rule that their slide presentation had all the graphic sophistication of … I dunno … Powerpoint 1995? A little animation here and there couldn’t hurt. Frankly, I was surprised we didn’t watch their sessions from flimsies poised atop an overhead projector they’d rented from an Arkansas public high school. Just an absolutely abysmal showing from one of the still-largest IT companies in the world.

Conclusions & Observations

One thing I did notice: The vendors who practiced their sessions with the GestaltIT team the week before the event generally got a better response from us delegates because they had a better understanding of delegates’ mind sets and prospective diversity of opinions about modern storage systems’ challenges.

After all, some of us have been working with storage technology for between 20 to 50 years, so we’ve seen amazing advances in reliability, but we’ve also seen what happens when a head crash happens on spinning rust. I’d encourage future Tech Field Day attendees regardless of the event theme to avail themselves of Gestalt IT’s offer to pre-present – it’s the best way to get maximum benefit from the whole experience.

I’m looking forward to the next Tech Field Day event I’ll be asked to attend, and I’m excited that there may actually be a Data Field Day theme in the coming months. After all … what curmudgeonly DBA wouldn’t lick their chops waiting for that?

As I wrap up my technology-advocacy-related travels for 2022 and plan out my (hopeful!) schedule for 2023, it’s a perfect time to reflect on the successful rebirth of the Oracle ACE Program this past summer. The new team that Jennifer Nicholson, our program’s key liaison, has put together in just a a few months has been astounding, and that achievement calls for some well-deserved acknowledgment.

First, A Bit of [Personal] History

I’ve been part of the ACE Program since early 2014. I believe I’m one of the very last ACE Directors to have been awarded that status without progression through the ranks of ACE Associate and ACE Pro (as we call those contribution levels today). In retrospect, that change was certainly warranted.

I still remember how excited I was at my first-ever ACE dinner at the Venetian that year, and how another ACE Director almost immediately asked to participate in the first-ever OTN Middle East tour that summer.

Wow, I remember thinking, I’m going to places I’ve never been before – Tunisia! Saudi Arabia! Dubai! – and best of all, I get a chance to speak to a diverse crowd of people from a completely different culture. I was hooked.

6 Continents. Still Counting.

Over the last few years I got a chance to visit Tokyo, Japan during an APAC Tour and most of South America – Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil – during LAOUC tours.

Of course, there were shorter trips “across the pond” to EMEA: Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark (Nordic OTN) as well as UKOUG (Liverpool, UK), DOAG (Nuremburg, DE), POUG (Poland), and ILOUG (Israel).

And I kept up my speaking schedule within North America too, at a plethora of regional conferences: UTOUG, COUG/MOUG, RMOUG, BCOUG, NYOUG, NEOOUG, COLLABORATE, and Kscope.

Challenging? Heck, yeah!

I had to develop new presentations every year, learn Oracle Cloud and Autonomous Database, and even delve back into application development – APEX, Machine Learning & Analytics, JSON, even edge computing.

The key thing here: I couldn’t have done any of this without the constant support from the ACE Program and the community of other ACEs. They uplifted me, encouraged me, helped me understand how important it was to connect with Product Managers at Oracle.

Most of all, gave me the opportunity to provide learning opportunities for folks coming to sessions to learn, connect, kibbutz, and maybe even be entertained though my lame attempts at humor.

And then, suddenly without warning, everything changed.

Hey, Who Turned the Lights Off?

In the spring of 2021, the ACE Program suddenly … changed. I’m not sure what the ultimate cause was, but I suspect a major shift in how the program was viewed within Oracle. And this isn’t that uncommon in huge organizations: A new player comes to the fore, different ideas are proposed, budget constraints shift suddenly, those in favor are no longer favored.

But suddenly, as if someone had reached into the breaker box and pulled the main switch down to OFF, the direction and future of the program was in a constant state of flux, and its very reason for existence seemed to be called into question.

Needless to say, this was extremely disturbing to our community of ACEs. We’re egotistical, opinionated, driven, and as easy to herd towards a goal as a cargo container full of angry wet cats.

That’s what makes us great advocates for Oracle tech, by the way: We’re not afraid to tell a PM that their product absolutely sucks, or that their use case documentation is non-sensible, or that they’re not understanding what their customers out in the field really want – right now! – and why that demand is actually important and reasonable.

We’re sort of like secret shoppers: We’re completely happy to tell you what your customer is really nervous to say to your face. Acknowledge us!

Wait … What Just Happened?

For whatever reason, that acknowledgment suddenly disappeared, replaced by an aggressive marketing orientation towards capturing the hearts and minds of thousands of younger developers – the kind of folks I hung with at Java One at OCW2022 while demonstrating and explaining the Raspberry Pi Supercluster.

To be clear, I’m not pointing fingers here: We desperately need to attract the younger folks to the fact that Oracle’s converged database philosophy makes sense in today’s world, and you don’t necessarily need to download and install yet another open source database to do what you can already do within Oracle 19c.

What frustrated us? We ACEs already knew this – in fact, many of us were already telling that story as part of our messaging.

ACE Program: Reborn!

Thankfully in mid-2022, the ACE Program was moved under the aegis of the Oracle Database team. This couldn’t have happened without Jenny Tsai-Smith, Gerald Venzl, and other key PMs at Oracle realizing there was still huge potential bottled up with our ACE community.

With the reopening of the economy post-COVID, we could again bring significant value to the new messaging around Oracle 23c. Jen Nicholson’s new team includes two deeply motivated, special people – Oana-Aurelia Bonu and Sapna Banga – whom I’ve gotten a chance to know better through recent OUG events.

Developer-Forward Orientation

I’m absolutely in favor of the new developer-forward orientation we’ve all seen as of OCW 2022. We’re focusing on making it even easier for DevOps folks to use the power of the database and features already included within it – spatial, graph, machine learning, analytics, and non-standard data formats like JSON and HIVE, no matter where the data lives.

Developers can build out new applications with tools like APEX and Visual Builder at light speed, and take advantage of microservice architectures within OCI.

Our ACE dinner at OCW 2022 celebrated the return of our program. It was serendipitous to gather in the very same restaurant I met many of my now-venerable colleagues back in 2014, and even more exciting to have EVPs Juan Loiza make a brief speech and share dinner with us, along with so many key Oracle PMs I’d not seen since before COVID times.

But that’s not where this story ends.

This Baby Still Needs Feeding

Even though our program has been reborn, it’s still an infant in some ways: We have a new team of players within Oracle helping us maintain it, but without us ACEs letting Oracle know how much we appreciate that support, there’s always the chance it could become malnourished again, suffer sickness, and slowly fade away.

So, my fellow Oracle ACEs, as you sit down for family get-togethers during this season of light and joy, please take the time to send a message back to the ACE Program’s leadership (and even better, to the PMs and powers that be at EVP level and above, if you have that reach!) to let them know just how much we appreciate the effort and funding that went into restoring our beloved tech advocacy program.

Remember: It takes a lot of energy and devotion to herd us angry wet cats!

Just a quick blog post to let everyone who’s followed me on Twitter as @JimTheWhyGuy: I’ve now shifted over to Mastodon, and you can follow me here.

Fear not – you can absorb, critique, chuckle at, or throw shade at my usual wit and wisdom on all things related to technology – especially Oracle as usual, but lately more focused on Oracle APEX, Machine Learning & Analytics, and Graph & Spatial – on Mastodon instead of Twitter.

So … what happened? Well, to be perfectly honest, I simply do not know yet. Apparently a recent Tweet must have tripped some new algorithm and right in mid-posting about the happenings at UKOUG Breakthrough22, I found my handle had been permanently suspended. I’ve asked for clarification as to exactly which Twitter rules were violated, and I’ve filed numerous appeals daily, but no one has responded to explain precisely what was the root cause of the suspension.

To be 100% clear: I heartily approve of content moderation, and I hope to eventually find out what I’d tweeted that broke the rules so that I can speedily remove that content – I’m sure the folks at Twitter must be overwhelmed lately with millions of similar requests, and my heart goes out to them! – but there’s just too much to talk about these days to wait any longer.

The most interesting side effect? I’ve suddenly found an extra hour or three on my hands daily. I’m going to leverage that “found time” to focus on providing quality content to those who deserve to read it, instead of descending into social media maelstroms every few hours. Come along for the ride, my friends and colleagues – it’s a brave new world out here!