OSCON 2009 Presentation "Taming your Data: Practical Data Integration Solutions with Kettle" now online

I just delivered my OSCON 2009 presentation "Taming your data: Practical Data Integration Solutions with Kettle". I think it went pretty well, and I got good responses from the audience. I did have much more material than time, and I probably should have proposed to do a tutorial instead. Maybe next year :) Anyway, you can find the presentation and the examples on the OSCON 2009 website. The slides are available in pdf format. There's also a zip file that contains the presentation as well as the kettle sample transformations and jobs.

"Starring Sakila": a Data Warehousing mini-tutorial at the MySQL UC 2009

Hi!

Recently I wrote about how glad I was to see two of my proposals for the upcoming MySQL Conference approved.

I am absolutely thrilled to see my third proposal has been approved as well: "Starring Sakila: data warehousing explained, illustrated and subtitled". I'm very proud to announce that I'm doing this talk together with Matt Casters, chief data integration of Pentaho and creator of the popular ETL/Data Integration suite Kettle (a.k.a Pentaho data integration).

During this 45-minute seminar, Matt and I will take the Sakila sample database and explain how to design and load a data warehouse for it, and how to use that to create those reports and charts that makes the managers smile ;-). Along the way, we'll explain often uttered terms and concepts such as dimensional model, denormalization, star schema, OLAP, data staging, business intelligence, ETL and data integration.

Note that this session is targeted at SQL developers, DBAs and tech-savvy analysts ('suits' are most welcome) that are new to business intelligence and datawarehousing. We noticed that although data warehousing and business intelligence are hardly new topics, there is still a lot of confusion surrounding them. The goal of this session is mainly to explain what it is all about, and to immediately make the concepts we cover tangible by illustrating it using a database schema which is easy to grasp, and which already familiar to most of the MySQL crowd.

Of course - the MySQL User's conference will feature more advanced data warehousing and business intelligence session too. I am pretty sure we will see a lot of Infobright and Kickfire. One session that I know will be very interesting is Matt's talk on utilizing computing clouds to power highly performing, scalable ETL processes.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to it. I will post a more detailed overview of the content of this and the other sessions I'm involved in when the conference date is nearing.

Video

A video recording of this session can be found here, courtesy of Sheeri.

Webinar: Introducing MySQL Workbench

September 16, 10:00 am PST, 1:00 pm EST, 18:00 GMT

I'm proud to inform you that I will be hosting a MySQL Workbench Webinar, September 16. You can find the announcement right here.

I have spent quite a deal of time testing MySQL Workbench. Thanks to the hard work of the MySQL Developer Tools Team, the tool just becomes better and better each new build. Personally, I think it is high time to present its features and benefits in a web seminar, and when Giuseppe asked me to do it, I was more than happy to oblige.

I'll shortly post an outline of some of the key features I will be presenting. Most likely, I'll address a number of issues I've seen recurring on the MySQL Workbench Forums, but I also intend to demonstrate a number more advanced features that I hope will benefit DBAs as well as Developers.

Stay tuned ;)