Today I participate to SOUG Day which takes place in Lausanne at the “Centre Pluriculturel et social d’Ouchy”.

After a coffee and a welcome speech by Yann Neushaus, Ludovico Caldara and Flora Barriele,

the event starts with 2 global sessions:

A l’heure du serverless, le futur va-t-il aller aux bases de données distribuées?

Franck Pachot makes a comparison between Oracle products (Active Data Guard, RAC, Sharding) and new distributed databases in order to scale-up and scale-out.
Briefly his talk makes reference to:
– Differences among RDBMS, NoSQL and NewSQL according to the CAP Theorem
– Definition and needs for NoSQL and NewSQL
– Definition of services such as Google’s Cloud Spanner, TiDB, CockroachDB, YugabyteDB.

From DBA to Data Engineer – How to survive a career transition?

Kamran Agayev from Azerbaijan speaks about what Big Data in general is and the transition from DBA to Database Engineer.
He addresses several interesting topics:
– Definition of Big Data
– Which are the skills for a Data Engineer, a Data Architect (more complex competences than “just” being a Database Administrator)
– Definition of products like Hadoop, Kafka, NoSQL
After the coffee break, the choice is between 2 different streams. Here some words about the sessions I attend.

Amazing SQL

Laetitia Avrot from EnterpriseDB talks about SQL, which is much more than what we know. SQL is different from other programming languages but it must be treated as one of them. At school we still learn SQL from before 1992, but in 1999 it changed to add relational algebra and data atomicity. PostgreSQL is very close to this standard. Laetitia shows lots of concrete examples of subqueries, common table expressions (CTE), lateral joins (not implemented in MySQL for the moment), anti joins, rollup, window functions, recursive CTE, and also some explanations about key words such as in, values, not in, not exists.

Graph Database

After the lunch, Gianni Ceresa presents property graph databases as combination of vertex (node, properties, ID) and edge (node, ID, label, properties). To start working with Oracle graphs, we can use PGX (Oracle Labs Parallel Graph AnalytiX). The OTN version is better for documentation. Through a demo, Gianni shows how to build a graph using Apache Zeppelin as interpreter and Phyton and Jupyter to visualize it. And then we can also use it to write some data analysis.

5 mistakes that you’re making while presenting your data

Luiza Nowak, a non-IT girl working with IT people (she is a board member of POUG), talks about IT presentations. There are 4 important parts defining them: the content, the story, the speaker performance and visualization.
Here recurrent errors of IT presentations and how to handle them:
1. Lack of data selection – you need to filter your data, to consider who and where you are talking to
2. Too much at once – you need to divide your content, create some suspense and put less information into slides to let the audience listen to you instead of reading them
3. Forget about contrast – you have to use contrast on purpose because it can be useful to underline something but it can also distract your audience
4. Wrong type of charts – you have to be clear about your data and explain results
5. You don’t have any story – you need to conceptualize your data.

How can Docker help a MariaDB cluster for disaster/recovery

Saïd Mendi from dbi services explains what a MariaDB Galera Cluster is and his benefits and how Docker can help in some critical situations. Actually you can create some delayed slaves which can be useful to emulate the flashback functionality.

Conclusion

SOUG Day arrives to an end. It was a nice opportunity to meet international speakers, discuss with some customers and colleagues, learn and share. As usual, this is part of dbi services spirit and matches with our values!
And now, I have to say you goodbye: it’s the aperitif and dinner time with the community 😉 Hope to see you at the next SOUG event.