The Data Lobby

A completely different (non-technical) short post today.  I recently delivered another successful Delphix training course for a large corporate customer and specifically for their global support team in Pune, India (actually there were six from the support team plus one from their build team and one from the core engineering team).  That’s another eight Delphix experts created!

The course run on this occasion is a bespoke one designed specifically for the customer but heavily based on the Delphix DDP Enhanced course offered by Kuzo Data and includes some specific topics around the customers own implementation of Delphix.  It’s a fairly intense four days with a lot to cover but I think the guys get way more from this in a shorter amount of time than doing the Admin, Self-Service and Masking courses individually.

As usual the labs used by the students are AWS hosted classes developed by Delphix Education and provide the students with their very own environment including an unconfigured Delphix engine along with source and target (and staging) servers running Oracle or SQL Server.  For this course I ran an Oracle and SQL class concurrently as we had two SQL Server DBA’s and 6 DB2 DBA’s who preferred to use Oracle over SQL Server for their labs.

Apart from a slight technical glitch working in the labs (which we worked around – nine technical people in a room will always find a solution!) the sessions ran smoothly.  The course begins with an introduction and overview of Delphix, so lots of talking from me, before we move onto the admin section and the guys get their hands on Delphix – everyone creating users and environments, ingesting a dsource and provisioning VDBs.  They got to play with policies, hooks and perform some data operations as well as navigate around the admin GUI.

Onto the self-service section where, as administrators, the guys created templates and containers and assigned owners before working with all the data operations available through the GUI.  It’s often at this stage that you can see how impressed the students are with the technology, especially if they’re DBAs (who have usually spent years performing these tasks on physical databases where it can take hours/days)

This particular course has a fast paced section on data masking where the students get to mask some actual data and gain an appreciation of how simple it can be.  Then we move on to some advance topics where they get to use the CLI and learn about the API.  After a short section on their organisations specific implementation the whole class then have to perform the Final Exercise where they onboard a source database and complete a full pipeline through to having Self-Service fully configured, and all created in line with their organisations standards.

It’s at this point when I really get a great sense of satisfaction, as each student works through the exercise and completes it successfully.  They feel proud of their achievement and so do I!  The guys on this course were all very competent DBAs and so picked up the knowledge quickly, which makes my job easier, but, just as important, they were all nice people and good for a laugh.  Personally I’m not a fan of those courses where it’s oh so serious!  I like a laugh myself and enjoy good conversation too so I always encourage it on my courses.  My favourite parts are when I’m asked questions and have to bring out the white board and do some doodles to explain the answer.  It’s this interaction that makes for an enjoyable experience for both the student and me.

One final thing, a big thankyou to each of the students on this course (and the previous ones I’ve run in India).  You all made me feel very welcome and lunchtime in the canteen was especially good.  I still have no idea what each of those currys were but they were first class!

Delphix class of July ’18!