Art of the Conference Session

22 Sunday Sep 2013

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I am fortunate enough to work for a company who is prepared to fly its staff across the Atlantic to attend a conference – which means I’m at one of the biggest (maybe the biggest) IT conference in the world – Oracle Open World.

Day 1 is a bit of a precursor with all the sessions being driven by various user groups. With about 30 sessions running at anyone time today it’s a job just to work out which sessions to attend.

This gives me my 1st observation of the day – if session is a panel based then say in the title. I attended one session that was meant to cover the development ecosystem, with the expectation of either getting a better handle on tooling around development of things like PL/SQL or perhaps the adoption of more contemporary tooling such as Maven or Git. What happened we heard was a conversation between a couple of panelists which really left me thinking that a lot of Oracle development is still in the dark ages technically, didn’t really appreciate what Agile says about documentation and the world was either agile or waterfall – the fact that Oracle Unified Methodology (OUM) is a derivative of the iterative RUP model.

The second observation is, tell me something don’t just throw facts at me with just slides full of bullets, you won’t hold people’s attention. In fact one session resulted in people walking out in droves.

That said, we also saw some very good presentations, and in fact these tended to keep amount amount of slide content down, but there is a narrative, building and emphasising key points. The presenter spoke with an intonation that showed that they where presenting because it was a subject they cared about and wanted to share their understanding, not because they want kudos for appearing.

The last lesson, is declare whether slides etc will be made available, so you have people’s full attention, rather than them bashing at their mobile devices making unnecessary notes. Although this sounds counter intuitive to the previous point you can enrich the slides with notes, to support later slide review.

SQL Static Code analysis for MySQL

05 Thursday Sep 2013

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With MySQL now capable of features such as stored procedures and functions the need for tooling to support SQL code quality is greater than ever. A number of tools provide editors with syntax support and all the fancy features you’d expect from a modern IDE (see Toad as a leading product).

However the means to assess the quality of the procedures or scripts written for MySQL or the divergence from ISO standards doesn’t exist, although plenty of options exist for T-SQL (MS SQL Server), PL/SQL (Oracle) and even some tooling for DB2 and Informix.

The value of the static analysis tool means you can implement quality measures, controls and reporting through Continuous Integration tooling such as Jenkins, Sonar etc. All of which is a little ironic when you consider a lot of energy in CI (and Continuous Delivery appears to come from the open source community) which usually supports MySQL as one of the 1st options for databases.

Does this mean there is a gap in the market? Such capabilities dont seem to be in the MySQL WorkBench roadmap. Would love to know what people think?

Of course if you can support MySQL, then the offshoots such as MariaDB wouldn’t be too difficult.

The Waze Way

02 Monday Sep 2013

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I have recently been introduced to the Sat Nav app Waze with its social capabilities that users to update the maps with events such as traffic jams, accidents speed cameras and so on.

This weekend, we went away and as my wife has the family car, she tends to do the driving – great I can have a beer. But on the long motorway runs I get bored and nod off, much to my wife’s disatisfaction. So this time I elected to keep from nodding off by comparing my wife’s car built in Sat Nav (which has data feeds on accidents etc) and Waze with its social feed information and its routing algorithms.

In terms of routing – the car and Waze are as good as each other, Waze might even have a slight edge as when we had to divert to avoid an accident it took us around a town’s high street where as the car took straight through the middle of a town with its particularly slow traffic.

The car did at least give us earlier warning of events ahead on the route we where following, although Waze allowed us to get a better sense of the severity of the issue based on the number of traffic jam reports, how old they where and so on.

What really was amusing was as a passenger I could sit looking for problems and broken down vehicles etc etc to report and pickup points (given I told friends given I travel a lot more I’d have to outstrip them on the social scoring soon).

This got me to thinking, what stops something like Waze from being extended to keeping the children entertained with a ‘car bingo’ or ‘eye spy’ given that children could add information to Waze to allow additional information and it be shared in the same manner as the serious stuff.

UK Supermarket CD sales

18 Sunday Aug 2013

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A few years back the UK major supermarkets took on the high street music retailers such as HMV and Virgin (who became Zavvi and then went under).

At the time I wasn’t overly concerned as I felt HMV and co had been over priced when it came to the charts – and harming the music business. A premium on back catalogue or obscure titles is the price of the store taking the risk of holding something they may not be able to sell and ok by me. So some pricing competition on the top 20 charts couldn’t hurt.

The outcome was a lot of belly aching about how supermarkets would destroy the high street rather than taking the battle to the super markets. As it turns out that skirmish was nothing to the growth of the net and Amazon particularly.

Back to today; having just been into a reasonably sized Tesco to get some shopping I was up for some instant CD gratification in the form of Daft Punk’s latest opus (official UK charts put it at no 23 UK Charts). But not a hint of it, with a couple of exceptions the store reflected nothing of the biggest selling names, the shelves are stuffed with compilations.

So who wins, well the music business aren’t selling more albums feeding and inspiring artists which will produce material for the future compilations. This means buying drops in turn the supermarkets actually losing out.

As for me, I shall start avoiding the supermarkets – instant gratification will come from the indie stores or dare I say it HMV – a name I used to consider the enemy of sensible pricing and good taste.

Book Review – MySQL Workbench: Data modelling & Development by Michael McLaughlin

02 Friday Aug 2013

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MySQL Workbench Data Modeling and Development

MySQL Workbench Data Modeling and Development

Having reviewed several books recently, and currently working on another book – I was offered the chance to look at MySQL Workbench: Data Modelling & Development by Michael McLaughlin which I took up as I was interested to know more about the Workbench tool (despite having worked with MySQL on and off for about 10 years, I’ve only really used command line and SQL editors or Eclipse plugins when working with MySQL).

From a pure readability perspective, this is undoubtedly technically well written. My difficulty with the book comes from the style, and presumed level of intelligence of the reader.  The difficulty comes from several perspectives’ firstly the author can feel a little condescending, to illustrate my point on page 180 the book says ‘Select Schemata step (that’s a fancier word for the fancy word schema) ‘.  Do you really need such a statement? Further the book spends the best part of the first 100 pages on walking through UI based installers for Windows 7, Linux (Debian and Fedora), and Mac OS X.  Although the look and feel of these installers will differ slightly, aside from some of the environmental considerations (configuring your hosts file for example) the installation process is consistent enough (and obvious enough given it is UI wizards) to only need to explain the end to end process for one platform, and then just address the differences for the other platforms, not repeat the entire process.  The only blessing in these first couple of chapters the author has thought to highlight a few common install issues and their resolutions (addressing my classic complaint people only think about the happy path). During the installation, the book makes reference to the use of DNS, but I don’t believe the use of DNS in a production environment is particularly well explained.

Having waded through to chapter 3 we can get started with the modelling aspect of the workbench. The chapter sets out first to explain some modelling concepts – starting with Object Orientation (OO) but doesn’t do a great job of it, starting out making reference to a number principles but then talking about the ‘principle of the one’, given my experience I did understand what the author was trying to express but, for someone experienced it could have been more simply expressed.  after OO, Normalisation is explained, and what defines the different levels of normalisation, but not the mechanics that can be followed to go from the levels of normalisation (something I was taught over 20 years ago).  Given that book talks about modelling,  I had expected the book to at-least touched upon other modelling approaches used for delivering the needs of data warehousing (star schemas etc), but his didn’t even obtain an aside.  Having spent nearly 100 image heavy pages on installation, all of these concepts are introduced in a single very text heavy chapter, which feels like we’ve swung too far the other way.

As the book goes on into development aspects it errs away from addressing SQL at all, and focuses entirely on designing with INNODB table behaviours.  Admittedly INNODB is the common engine (and the default assumed behaviour when thinking about database tables) but isn’t the only table type.  All of which is a shame as if you want to get the most out of MySQL the other table types have their value and benefits.

So, what value does the book bring.  Well for a student learning about databases for the 1st time (hard visualize when you think how pervasive the technology is today – even smart phones carry DBs now) this book along with a good guide on SQL and you’d be well on your way to getting some practical experience with MySQL.  to be honest the book would have setup far better expectations if it had been called MySQL Workbench for Dummies.  For the seasoned engineer who has worked with MySQL, understands database design then you might want to think twice about getting this book; that said I did pickup a few useful titbits – but getting them was hardwork.

Useful Links for the book:

Java EE 7 Development with Netbeans videos

02 Friday Aug 2013

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Java EE Development with NetBeans 7 [Video]

Java EE Development with NetBeans 7 [Video]

Earlier this year I reviewed some videos by David Heffelfinger on Java EE Development with Netbeans 7 .  I’m pleased to say that the videos have now become publicly available on the Packt site – http://www.packtpub.com/java-ee-development-with-netbeans-7/video  The videos come in neat bite sized chunks that allow you review how to do a particular task, with the videos back to back providing a solid joined up view of a range of activities using a common set of examples.  I’d recommend checking them out if you want to know more about either Netbeans or common web development approaches with Java 7.

 

David also has a book out on the subject of Java EE 6 with Netbeans as well http://www.packtpub.com/java-ee-6-development-with-netbeans-7/book   and his author page at packt – http://www.packtpub.com/authors/profiles/david-heffelfinger

 

Enterprise Security – A Data Centric Approach

16 Tuesday Jul 2013

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Enterprise Data SecurityAs I work my way through the Aaron Woody book Enterprise Security: A Data Centric Approach to Securing the Enterprise I’ve been building a mind map of helpful notes -to help serve as a reminder or means to quickly drill back into the book for future reference.

The mind map has been build using freemind – it isn’t the prettiest of documents, but content is king here.

Freemind Mindmap as an image https://www.dropbox.com/s/u1ggk7exi6t0t3o/Enterprise%20Data%20Security.png  as a Freemind file https://www.dropbox.com/s/lf53fs63c4x1v91/Enterprise%20Data%20Security.mm freem,ind can be obtained from freemind.sourceforge.net/‎

Enterprise Security: A Data-Centric Approach to Securing the Enterprise – book review chapter 2

14 Sunday Jul 2013

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Enterprise Security - A Data Centric Approach to Securing the Enterprise

Enterprise Security – A Data Centric Approach to Securing the Enterprise

Continuing with the review of Enterprise Security: A Data Centric Approach to Securing the Enterprise by Aaron Woody having given a bit of history and motivation for an alternate approach Chapter 2 of the book starts describing the data centric approach.

We start out looking at why network boundaries need to revisited – as a result of BYOD, closer integration with business partners, collapsed/simplified software stacks etc.  Then go into defining in more details the data centric views and how t go about building a trust model for identifying what needs to be secured. A trust model looks at the different dimensions that can impact data:

  • Data (what actually are we protecting – is the data your commercial crown jewels such as a customer list, classifying the data to understand its characteristics, where is it located and so on)
  • Processes – what can be done to data
  • Applications – systems interacting with data
  • Users – differentiated from roles – their relationship to the data employees, contractors, third parties etc
  • Roles – the roles people have to perform, system admins, data stewards etc
  • Risk – as you can never guarantee everything, what are the consequences of a breach
  • Policy & Standards – legal requirements e.g. HIPAA, PCI DSS, DPA plus internal corporate policies

With the guidance to help gather the information you can start to build a profile of your data and the need (or not) for security with challenges and risks that need be addressed to achieve this within an organisation.  All of which has to take into account of ‘data at rest’ (i.e. in databases, flat files etc) and ‘in motion’ transfers such as email, HTTP, FTP, SQLNet and so on.

The book then begins to talk about architectures that can reflect the considerations and needs of your data.

In terms of the writing, chapter is pretty direct and to the point which is great as long as you have some basic appreciation of security needs.  It would have been good to enrich the information with some examples (although the Appendix does illustrate a bit further). The ideal would have been to have a use case running through the book (perhaps at the end of each chapter applying some of the ideas to a fictitious scenario).

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Enterprise Security: A Data-Centric Approach to Securing the Enterprise – book review

02 Tuesday Jul 2013

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I have started to review another book, this time Enterprise Security: A Data-Centric Approach to Securing the Enterprise by Aaron Woody. Based on the interest that my review of Getting Started with Oracle Event Processing 11g I thought I’d follow a similar approach of reviewing one or two chapters at a time, although because of other constraints possibly not as quickly as last time.

As an enterprise architect, and having worked within some more sensitive environments which means security typically has a lock the world down, particularly at the perimeter. But with an increasingly less practical as we become ever more connected. Not to mention the tighter the old approaches are applied, the more the business will by pass IT (e.g. Go acquire SaaS solutions without IT support), the net result being a home goal in undermining the very thing you’re trying to achieve. So the killer question is, can the book show another way that works matching the challenges ranging from SaaS (software as a service) to BYOD (bring your own device – i.e. connecting your own smart phone to systems and work with them on the move etc) against the backdrop of increasing data legislation and commercial fallout (customer loss etc) as a result of security breaches becoming public knowledge.

Chapter 1 is very much a good scene setter, providing some of the background as to how security approaches have evolved over the last 30 or so years. It sets out some clear perspectives on the challenges of applying security such as

  • making cases for investment
  • Applying security as an overlay on a solution rather than being an integral part of a design and the impacts this can cause
  • The challenges of stakeholders involved
  • The mentality of just locking the perimeter (when statistics regularly show that increasing data leakages are a result of accident or malicious actions by those inside the organisation

The book also challenges the mentality of security is the network, which a grave mistake as security impacts processes and roles just as much as it does the software and physical infrastructures.

This sets up for the journey for defining an alternate approach starting with defining the boundaries that should be considered.

Amusing paper article from Oz

30 Sunday Jun 2013

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PERTH – An SAS trooper collecting toys for children was stabbed when he helped stop a suspected shoplifter in east Perth . The ‘Toys-R-Us’ Store Manager told ‘The West Australian’ that a man was seen on surveillance cameras last Friday putting a laptop under his jacket at the store.

When confronted, the man became irate, knocked down an employee, pulled a knife and ran toward the door. Outside were four SAS Troopers collecting toys for the “Toys For Tots” program. Smith said the Troopers stopped the man, but he stabbed one of them in the back. Fortunately the cut did not appear to be severe.

The suspect however was transported by ambulance to the Royal Perth Hospital with two broken arms, a broken leg, possible broken ribs, multiple contusions, and assorted lacerations including a broken nose and jaw … Injuries he apparently sustained when he tripped whilst trying to run away. One of the Troopers said, “He was a clumsy bastard.”