What is a sherpa? A tough, happy, well-adapted Nepali who guides, watch overs and ensures the success of ambitious mountain climbers.
This blog and its resources are similar: experiences, observations, tips, white papers and presentations meant to help those attempting to scale the learning curve of Oracle design and development, to ensure your work is fun and quick, and your work products solid, flexible and performant. In a nutshell, this blog is about giving back and sharing knowledge. If you’d like to be a database sherpa as well, authoring articles for the blog, feel free to use the Contact Admin link and we’ll talk!
The primary focal points will be:
- Data modeling
- PL/SQL design, build, test and tune
- Best practices of software programming and Agile development as applied to database applications
- Tips and stories of success and failure from the trenches
Use the navigation sidebar (click on the three bar icon in the top left corner) to find past articles and links to the resources this blog offers.
What makes me tick:
Born in Cache Valley, Utah, I spent most of my youth working with my father and camping outdoors. Fell in love with the Rocky Mountains that surrounded me, canyons and adventures just a couple miles from my front door. Introduced to computers in the early eighties, became a technology fanatic and enjoyed the challenge of earning Double Ruby in debate in high school. Graduated as the salutatorian (that’s 2nd place academically). Served a mission for my church among the Latinos of Dallas, Texas from ’88 to ’90. With Spanish under my belt, decided a business major with another language mastered would be a good idea. Graduated with an honors BA in Near Eastern Studies and Arabic, with a minor in business and Spanish. Started work with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) in January of 1995 in San Francisco. Working for Andersen in the Bay Area during the tech boom allowed me to work with really large databases and advanced systems from day one, always on a custom-built Oracle system with lots of PL/SQL. Although I spent some time with C, C++, Java and javascript as a front-end developer and architect early on, eventually I gravitated to information design and management. Work with Pacific Bell, US WEST, and AT&T seasoned me well. Eventually left consulting to join a telecom startup in Golden, CO. They’re still going strong. But I left in 2004 to join my best friend’s company in Houston to do data architecture and PL/SQL for them. Hurricane Katrina and Rita were fun and it was a great place to raise my family, but the Rockies were calling me. I came back to Utah in 2007 to help the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints build and streamline many of its Oracle-based systems. Been enjoying the familiarity of home and nearby family ever since. In 2019 I joined O.C. Tanner as their Enterprise Data Architect. Fixed their crippling Oracle performance and storage problems, then built their data culture from the ground up, built and and populated a new master data system, researched data quality problems, designed many of their new systems helping them migrate to AWS RDS postgres-based microservices, and ensuring data architecture and SQL changes could be done in an agile manner. Was beginning large-grained projects for them in data management, like data catalog, data lineage, data library and data governance, when I went through a layoff. Currently looking for a new role in database design, data leadership or data engineering.
I’ve been speaking at conferences like UTOUG, RMOUG, IOUG and ODTUG since 2001. Used to frequent PL/SQL forums on the web, write articles and maintain some pages reviewing Oracle tools, data modeling tools and PL/SQL IDEs on OraFaq. Nowadays, with six children and an ever-growing basket of interests and obsessions, it’s all I can do to meet my employer’s needs, garden and get in a some biking, hiking and back-country adventures here and there. Am starting a PL/SQL development book at the moment; we’ll see how that goes…