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In a year that started with only the third impeachment in history of a sitting President of the USA, a global pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, major unrest and justifiable demands for social justice and an end to police violence in so many of our towns and cities, and an unprecedented general election campaign that saw incredible voter turnout and post-election turmoil across my fine nation, I found myself drawing dark comfort from one of the most appropriate bumper stickers I’ve seen this year: Giant Meteor 2020. Just End It Already.

So what will 2021 bring? Here’s my viewpoints on technology, human civilization, and hope for an amazing year and decade.

Everywhere, the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT shows no signs of stopping its expansion into our daily lives, and that’s not a bad thing, either. Wearable devices, real-time contact tracing, and even cybernetic implants have made news in 2020. Remember that the whole point of IPV6 addressing was to make networking available for up to some 50 trillion individual devices by 2050, and I’ll be keeping an eye on that trend in this decade.

What’s also fascinating to me is the incredibly low-cost capabilities of IoT, made possible by cheap and reliable Raspberry Pi and Arduino computing nodes, sensors, and hubs. For example, today I’m putting the finishing touches on what I believe is a pretty sophisticated home security system, all built on IoT components. I’ve been able to build that with open-source software and a lot of help from online support communities. It’s not been without frustration, but I’ve learned so much from the experience that I’m ready to move on to more challenging tasks.

Machine Learning, AI, and Decision By Digital. All these IoT data sources offer our human civilization an incredible set of amazing opportunities, including more efficient agriculture, intelligent electric vehicles, “smart cities,” closed-loop recycling, cleaner air and water, and especially electric power infrastructure. But to clear the grain from the chaff, we’ll need ever-better machine learning algorithms, artificial intelligence, and digitally-driven decision making to take advantage of these exabytes of information.

Convergence, in Databases and Applications. 2020 clearly demonstrated that just-in-time supply chains have some weaknesses during times of stress from global events like the COVID-19 pandemic as well as local catastrophes like the Australian and Californian wildfires and a horrendous series of tropical storms and hurricanes. That means we’ll need to consider where our critical databases, applications, and infrastructure is located, too, so I’ll be watching trends towards converged solutions like Oracle’s Application Express (APEX) and its emphasis on its Converged Database strategy.

Emphasis on Objective Truth. Finally, if this past year has shown us anything – from the USA’s incredibly incompetent response to COVID-19 as well as the dramatically divergent political extremes about the reliability of the results from the USA’s general election – it’s the value of objective, verifiable, trustworthy facts and information. My country’s information infrastructure has been badly damaged, not just by recent nation-state actors’ hacking attempts, but by a deliberate rejection of expertise and knowledge provided by trustworthy professionals about everything from basic principles of public heath to how elections actually work.

It’s going to take at least a few years to restore that faith and trust in public institutions so that we can move on to tackle the enormous problems facing our human civilization in everything from climate change to clean energy transformation. But I’m optimistic that we can still get there because, as Jeff Bridges says in Starman, “When things are at their very worst, humans are at their very best.”

Bring it on, 2021! We are ready to be at our very best.

As you’ve probably heard, I’ve tossed my hat into the proverbial ring for ODTUG Board membership.

This is the first time I’ve ever run for any position of this stature in my life, and hopefully my platform and vision for the future of ODTUG will help you decide if I’m worthy of this honor. (My fellow candidates’ positions are also there, so please do take the time to read through our credentials and proposals.)

One thing is for sure: We have a most excellent roster of ODTUG candidates to choose from! I’m amazed at the talent that we have attracted to ODTUG, and that’s why I firmly believe we’re the premier Oracle User Group in North America bar none. So no matter who you vote for, please do vote! It’s crucial that every member of ODTUG has their voice heard, especially in these challenging times for our families, our careers, and our industry.

As we start the second half of 2020, it’s a great time to reassess where we’ve been and where we’re headed. For example, I just realized it’s been six whole months since my last blog post, but it’s not like anything happened since the beginning of the year, right?

It’s hard for me to believe that in late January, as I was getting ready to attend what turned out to be my last in-person Oracle User Group event for the year (so far), that my greatest worry was whether the conflict between the USA and Iran might erupt into a shooting war while I was speaking in Tel Aviv at ilOUG2020. That seems like such a fond memory of relative normalcy when compared to once-in-a-generation events like:

a) a Presidential impeachment that further polarized USA politics;
b) a pandemic outbreak that the USA should have tackled and defeated handily;
c) record disruption of economic systems worldwide as a result of the pandemic;
d) major civic unrest after years of brutal police violence towards people of color, and many of us have said at last “Enough!”; and finally
e) increasing tensions between several major world powers.

Through all this drama, my wife and I have spent countless hours worrying about younger family members all in possible contact with COVID-19 through their work either indirectly or directly support health care in hospitals, nursing homes, and the Veterans’ Administration. We’ve sewn face masks for them, sent messages of encouragement and thanks, and made sure they knew we loved them and honored their commitment to their professions.

And what better time could I have personally chosen to move my career in a different direction?

In mid-April, I said a fond farewell to the team at Viscosity North America, as I’ve decided to concentrate more on volunteerism for causes like Hire Heroes USA as well as helping our local US Congressman during his efforts to secure a second term during the upcoming 2020 general election. In both cases, it’s been a great opportunity to develop some real-world use cases for Oracle Application Express (APEX), Visual Builder, and Machine Learning, which I’ve been writing about since early 2020. In my role as ODTUG’s Database Community Lead, it’s been exciting to help some excellent authors publish their knowledge on our TechCeleration portal. (Don’t hesitate to contact us if you’re interested in volunteering to share what you know!)

So while I don’t know what the rest of 2020 holds for us all, I’m going to stay positive, focused, and most of all, science-based. If there’s anything positive that the COVID19 pandemic has provided, it’s the ability to learn just how many of us will decide to listen to scientific experts, follow their advice, and work together to get through these challenges. 

Stay safe, stay healthy, and most of all, don’t forget to vote in upcoming elections. It’s the only way things get better for everyone else!

I officially started my career as an Oracle DBA in 2001, but my path to that role spans two previous decades working so many different projects, organizations, and teams that I’ve often forgotten what it was like to be an applications developer. I still remember the thrill I got the first time I wrote a SQL statement and actually got back a meaningful result; I recall the first time that I successfully built a new PowerBuilder application that pulled data right out of an Oracle database gave me a similar jolt of joy.

I recently returned to my application development roots when I decided to build a new set of applications using Oracle Application Express (APEX), and I used my experiences this past summer as a volunteer for a US Congressional campaign to construct a series of use cases and requirements for a mobile, flexible, responsive application for voter canvassing. Now thanks to my editors and colleagues at IOUG, I’ve had the opportunity to chronicle those experiences from my perspective as an “old-school” Oracle DBA with a new article series entitled A DBA’s Journey to APEX. So far that journey has three parts:

• Part 1: From Napkin to Application In a Single Weekend explains how I constructed the original specifications and data model and built the original database schema for the application.
• Part 2: If We Build It, the Voters Will Come chronicles my introduction into setting up an APEX workspace and building the first rough draft of the corresponding application components.
• Part 3: Give Them a Lever, and They Will Move the World explains how I delved more deeply into APEX’s reporting and data entry capabilities, including development of a mobile application for voter canvassing.

All content is free courtesy of IOUG SELECT. I hope you get as much out of reading them as I did out of writing them. Happy computing!

Tim Hall’s recent blog post on his decade of experience as an Oracle ACE Director (and now as a Developer Champion) prompted me to think over my own experiences as an ACE Director since 2014. My perspectives are a bit different because of my different roles since I was awarded that status to my surprise in March of that year, but I’ve got a lot of similar experiences to share.

The Grind

For example, I recently took part in the far southern leg of the 2018 Latin America Oracle Developer Champion (LAODC) tour:

• I flew from Chicago to Sao Paolo, Brazil and then to Asuncion, Paraguay – an 11-hour journey – in standard coach seats, with a lengthy, unexpected delay that delayed my arrival until late that evening.
• I presented the next day, met with the user groups there, and then jumped on a plane with my colleagues to Santiago, Chile the next morning … except that meant flying east to Buenos Aires at 3 AM to fly back west to Santiago.
• The rest of the trip – 11 days, five cities, nine presentations – left very little time to really get more than a taste of these marvelous countries and cities. I’m not complaining – I’m just explaining these aren’t vacations, they’re deeply serious exchanges with our colleagues to help explain some of the finer points of Oracle application and database technology, and a chance to mentor our younger colleagues as they traverse their careers as IT professionals.
• Yes, we do celebrate a bit at our speakers’ dinners, and there’s a lot of camaraderie and shared stories, but after 11 days I was glad to take an afternoon off, take a break from talking about anything related to technology, and just catch up on a bit more sleep.

And that’s just one extended conference I attended this year. I just added up my scheduled events for 2018 and by mid-December, I will have presented at four major regional conferences in the USA (COLLABORATE, KSCOPE, GLOC, and ECO), two in Europe (DOAG and UKOUG), and close to a dozen smaller regional Oracle user groups and conferences.

• As Tim mentioned, ACE Directors do receive some limited compensation for these events, but trust me, we’re not traveling in business class unless we pay for it ourselves or use accumulated miles. I’ve only done that when I need to arrive in fighting shape and ready to present the next day. Think more RyanAir and Southwest than Emirates or British Airways, and you’ll get the picture.
• Before I was an ACE Director, I funded almost all of my conference attendance and travel on my own dime; a major conference can cost as much as $2000 once airfare, hotel, and other travel expenses are accounted for – but that doesn’t include the lost billing time if you are working as an independent contractor, or have to take vacation time to attend.
• Full disclosure: As the Oracle SME for ViON Corporation, based out of Herndon, VA, my employer has sponsored my participation at many of these conferences, so I don’t have to pay for most of my travel to those events. However, that also means I often have to do double-duty at the company’s vendor table to help salespeople decode Oracle DBA tech-speak, and so I often miss out on conference content and chances to learn alongside the event’s attendees.

TANSTAAFL

As the saying goes, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Presenting at these events demands a commitment to experimenting with the technology that underlies the presentations, mastering how it works well enough to present it effectively, and spending time with other professionals – ACEs and Oracle Master Product Managers and technology experts like Bryn Llewelyn, Maria Colgan, Anil Nair, Dominic Giles, Gerald Venzl, Marc Sewtz, and Steven Feuerstein, just to name a few! – to understand precisely why something is working the way it does.

As Tim has already mentioned, this simply takes a lot of time, especially in the run-up to major conferences like COLLABORATE, KSCOPE and OpenWorld. And since my employer doesn’t pay me to experiment on their time, that means I’ve got to either dedicate some of my non-billable time to design tests that demonstrate what I’m presenting about. So that means it’s not unusual in January and February to kiss my wife goodnight at 9:30 PM and toddle down to my chilly basement home office for several hours of exploration, testing, frustration, success, and hopefully some sleep usually in the wee hours of the morning.

It doesn’t end there, of course; with Oracle’s new release schedule, there are significant new features coming out every few months, and that means I’ve got to tweak, re-tweak, and rebuild at least a few slides between conferences and user group events. As I like to remind people, at most events you can usually find an ACE Director at the end of the hotel bar typing madly on his keyboard until the presentation is as close to perfect as possible.

So Why Do I Do It?

If this sounds a lot less glorious than you imagine, you’re right. So why do I keep doing it? For several reasons:

• I absolutely love presenting. I am in the fortunate position of doing something I love: standing in front of a crowd (the bigger the better), talking about technology I understand pretty well, telling stories about what I’ve been through – especially the mistakes and disasters! – and even pontificating about what I believe the future holds for our industry. It’s unbelievably edifying to see a light go on above someone’s head when they learn something new, see something in a completely different light, or even disagree and debate a bit.
• I stand on the shoulders of giants. My mentors – Arup Nanda, Kerry Osborne, Tom Kyte, Daniel Morgan, Maria Colgan, Penny Avril, Tim and Kellyn Pot’vin Gorman, Jeff Smith, Charles Kim, Connor McDonald, and dozens of other presenters and Oracle ACEs too numerous to mention – gave me a boost up, helped nurture me as a presenter and writer, encouraged me to try for ACE – and it would be shameful not to pay that support forward.
• It’s time to give back. Most of all, I’ve spent almost four decades in IT, and I’ve seen a lot of stuff happen. If I’ve learned anything, it’s figuring out that sometimes it’s more important to know what not to do in a sticky situation that can save a database, a project, and even a whole team. There’s a whole new generation of DBAs and developers coming into our industry that could really benefit from my experiences, and the only way our industry – indeed, our civilization! – gets better is by transferring that knowledge and uplifting our colleagues. That’s my passion and my purpose.

Note: These observations are entirely my own, and are not endorsed by Oracle Corporation, the Oracle ACE program, or my current employer.