Oracle Academy Tech Chat

In this Episode Orlaith Lawton speaks with Oracle ACE Roberto Capancioni about the importance of APEX and why it is the world's most popular low-code application platform. ------------------------------------------------------ Episode Transcript: 00:00:00:00 - 00:00:35:14 Unknown Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to Oracle Academy Texas, where we discuss how Oracle Academy prepares the next generation's workforce. 00:00:35:15 - 00:01:03:22 Unknown I'm your host Orlaith Lawton. In this episode, we dive into the transformative power of the low code software development and explore how it's reshaping industries, streamlining workflows, and enabling faster innovation. Our guest today is Oracle Ace Roberto Journey, and he shares his expertise on Oracle Apex, the world's most popular low code application platform. You're very welcome, Roberto. 00:01:04:02 - 00:01:34:01 Unknown Lovely to talk to you. And thank you so much for being our guest today on our podcast. Start off, Roberto, can you please give me a little bit about your background and your current job role? Thank you all for inviting me. If I'm open for me to be here with you and to share my knowledge in Oracle Apex and the Oracle technology in general, because I'm very, enthusiast of these environments. 00:01:34:01 - 00:02:37:17 Unknown And I try to explain why. My name is Roberto. I'm, I'm an engineer, and, I've been working in, in I.T for about 30 years. I started, focusing in databases or relational databases and, application development that many years ago for multi utility companies, also in, service sectors company. At the moment I work with mainly exclusively in apex project because they're a when I found the apex about 15 years ago, I thought that it was the, the only take for developing application in, in my career and the, in the the following of this podcast, I try to explain, explain why I also collaborators, 00:02:37:19 - 00:03:14:13 Unknown as a trainer and the also a consultant with companies and also education institution. So, I'm, I'd like to explain to student mainly to student and school because I think that at the moment the there is the need of this kind of, example of code of, the middle word technology, because, Oracle technology is suitable for company and also for educational institutions. 00:03:14:15 - 00:03:48:01 Unknown Thank you, Roberto, for that. And what is apex and what are the benefits of using Apex? Okay. In the apex is the, so-called low code development platform. Why low code look on? Because it the code at the moment is, mainly. And the hype word because the when you say low code, do you want to say that everybody can develop, quick and dirty applications. 00:03:48:03 - 00:04:30:01 Unknown And if you want, the apex can also do that. You can, develop in about an hour a very simple application. But the, the secret is that is also low code application. So it's suitable for business user, for student, for junior developers and also for enterprise applications or grades of housing because the technology that is below apex, that is the Oracle database is an enterprise platform. 00:04:30:01 - 00:05:16:07 Unknown So every company can leverage of database and the, the, low code, the environment, the to develop to develop application. So the secret is that, if you know, languages, if, you know, business problem, apex can without writing, single frontend code, the frontend means all the code that you have to write to create the web application that that usually it's not simple for also, for all the, old style, developers, apex do it for you. 00:05:16:07 - 00:05:51:11 Unknown So you can have to write frontend code. Also business code that you know that also or developers can do in they career and they don't know, web application because they are doing another job with apex. You can develop it quickly. Business application. So why is this the world's most popular low code application platform? I think for, for several reasons. 00:05:51:11 - 00:06:24:12 Unknown First of all, apex is included inside the, he tried the the Oracle database license, if you haven't to pay for apex because, apex is the database. Oracle is an extension of the database Oracle. So if you have a database, you data but you have to pay nothing to have Apex. You have a really apex in your environment. 00:06:24:12 - 00:07:23:01 Unknown You have even the two, provide the, application server or other, tech inside your component. Because if you have Oracle database, you have a really also apex. So, it's, it's very simple to start, but also, if you haven't developed with it and the it is, a mature technology because, even if, only this year we hear about, apex because when, Oracle became, cloud company about two, five years ago mainly, you know, also before, but, it's, the last five years that that there was an explosion in the cloud of Oracle apex became strategic because is inside the the cloud technology 00:07:23:01 - 00:08:02:03 Unknown of of Oracle. Sure. Oracle has auto language database. Autonomous database is a platform as a service that Oracle asks for. For the companies, you with a simple, subscription you and access, instantaneously to the database in the cloud. And also, apex also updated the maintain need that fine tuning the from Oracle you UI to be, online subscription and all is, provided for you. 00:08:02:03 - 00:08:37:13 Unknown So it's very easy to have an environment that is secure, is maintaining with the GDPR, at the moment. But, watchdog every DPO has to concern about the, the security, the, the explosion, exploitation and the all the problems that you have to maintain updated your environment with the autonomous database, the Oracle do it for you and apex is it inside the autonomous database. 00:08:37:15 - 00:09:20:18 Unknown So with a minimal effort, you have a mature, enterprise ready. GDPR really needs to read the environment. And, inside the your organization. So, I think that the company appreciate that because determinative there are several out there native. But only tools, only development tools. So Oracle is a complete the stack from the infrastructure from the Sabara database middleware, application server from them. 00:09:20:18 - 00:09:49:15 Unknown But, it it is the only product in the world, that can do that at the moment. That's a very detailed account of this. Thank you so much for that. Roberto, may I ask you can apex help with generators, AI or AI? Apex makes it easy to integrate AI model and external services inside the, inside is environment. 00:09:49:17 - 00:10:26:11 Unknown Mainly because, apex is the DB oracle. So as you know, the last, version of the, Oracle database is a 23 I why I mainly because you use that and marketing subject all today. All all products are AI but Oracle provide the SAP environment agent in the EAS autonomous cloud that can integrate with apex. 00:10:26:13 - 00:11:02:15 Unknown Apex has the, enterprise ready Add-On to, integrate with, a Lem agent that so you can do in ad declarative way without to, hassle, experience program because there are several weeds. And the several. Yeah. It really application inside the, the the gallery and the, demo product that, installed in provided in the apex environment. 00:11:02:17 - 00:11:48:17 Unknown So, always the AI is, increasing every way. The model, the MCP server, today we can have also tool that the provide the ASR, in interface to interact with the, agent that in, in the industry from which are GP3, cloud, IEEE, all the, the agent that we ever in at the moment and apic is the, enterprise ready to do that for the novice and the for the experience developer? 00:11:48:19 - 00:12:49:08 Unknown How do you see apex being used in the future? I believe that the apex will, becoming increasingly strategic for the organization. And the speed to, to see many extension also because of AI, IoT analytics. Don't forget that Oracle as wide ecosystem side that is cloud. The from the diffusion application that the software as a service application that Oracle provide to the companies and the analytics application we have in Oracle analytic servers in the apex again, can be the, the Swiss knife that the can integrate with the tailor made this process, all the orchestration, all the workflow that we can have between all 00:12:49:08 - 00:13:23:09 Unknown the Oracle ecosystem product but not also Oracle because the in the mean the Odeon world or the, enterprise application as a software as a service application and the, the rice there is that there are the, the standard interfaces to, interact with, the other products. Is convenience also focused on development, of integration. 00:13:23:09 - 00:13:57:19 Unknown So apex can do, invite development environment for software application, software as a service application, but also also integration application. And at the moment this is the most important things for the companies because all the companies, has ERP, cloud Europe very valued and the expensive environment and that are migrating in cloud. 00:13:57:21 - 00:14:42:22 Unknown So we are losing the but ability to connect directly with the database, because at the moment that they have on premise, product, when they, on cloud is more difficult to interact directly with the database. So they have an API, they have Rest services. They and, need other, tools to interact with the application to get, to fetch all their data for business intelligence, application front orchestration, AI application and data analysis. 00:14:43:00 - 00:15:21:09 Unknown Oracle apex can help a lot. And this is one of the my main, a job at the moment to integrate, into prize, application like ERP with custom software in the company with the Oracle Apex autonomous database to provide business intelligence, application reporting application, orchestration workflow application. Because the don't forget, apex is the, a very powerful environment also to create workflow application. 00:15:21:11 - 00:16:02:17 Unknown And the, is the mobile first, the, environment. So every, application that I create, the is provided first on the mobile mobile phone tablet, with also progressive web application that is and and I look and feel of native application but is more cheaper and more quickly to develop and the is robust and enterprise in the use of finally as a native application of the mobile. 00:16:02:18 - 00:16:39:02 Unknown So apex has all the instrument on the characteristic to be the first environment for, consumer enterprise applications and also integration application between software as a service, enterprise software. That is really interesting to hear. You know, I didn't realize just how valuable that is. Because when you look at apex, sometimes it seems so simple. You know, it is a low code, but it just shows you how instrumental it is. 00:16:39:02 - 00:17:00:01 Unknown And I love the description you give. It's a Swiss Army knife. That's a very good description of it being the Swiss knife, being able to, knit and everything together and fix everything together. And it sounds like it's, it's it can be used in very complicated manners as well, which is fantastic. So it's great for, our students and faculty to hear that. 00:17:00:03 - 00:17:38:06 Unknown And finally, Roberto, if you could give one piece of advice to faculty or students, what would that advice be? And my advice is, to start experimenting as soon as possible. Apex offers free and via romance. You can have, a workspace. A is the the first environment that you can have a workspace, asking for Oracle in, five minutes, account subscription. 00:17:38:08 - 00:18:12:20 Unknown Or you can ask for, free environment, a free tier and Oracle specify always free the always free because it is not not a thought. The these the environment the more. And then you have to be always free means that you can be inside always. And that this is the same enterprise environment is not limited. You have the same function ability. 00:18:12:20 - 00:18:43:08 Unknown And, all the environments that are major, apex, and not, machine learning, machine learning for Python at the moment with the students that we, providing an initiative where you start from the database with Apex, then extend with the Python library, machine learning Python, then back to the database, make to apex. So there is an integration and you can do that. 00:18:43:12 - 00:19:24:21 Unknown But in the free environment you have no limit. Also resource limit that for an education environment is not a problem. And neither for elite or enterprise leader. Business environment is not a problem because, you, you have a natural resource for how to, leader. Leader environment sure is suitable for a school for students that want to try because, if Oracle has the in several tutorials, several, initiative documentation, lab activity. 00:19:24:23 - 00:19:55:15 Unknown So you can also yourself as a student or, or as a teacher that want to provide to a class, a demo environment to, to start learning, experiment is the first one because you can do that. But with, a general in the I value deductive environment because, don't forget that the, the, sequel Oracle database is, is your stand up 23. 00:19:55:15 - 00:20:38:14 Unknown So, I'm afraid I need the teacher that say to me, but you, you are teaching, appropriate theory technology. Oracle is not that. Yes. Oracle is not open source. That sequel is just standard visual queen. If you learn Oracle database, you learn all the relational database. And the Oracle is more than that. If you learn apex is a web application and the user experience pattern that you can learn, genera, you can do that from, recreate from scratch, free within other environment. 00:20:38:14 - 00:21:17:02 Unknown But in apex you can learn faster. You can learn faster. Database, relational database. Web application paper. You pattern on application, master detail, application workflow, application automation, all the things that you find in apex. Standard, web standard tool that in another environment you have to create impact with the server. Yeah. Or but experience that or studying for more more time that with apex apex in weeks. 00:21:17:04 - 00:21:54:03 Unknown At the moment I it tomorrow I would finish at 20. Yeah I was course in apex where where and experience had people business user in 20 hours can create but I keep the business ready environment that can be used in production. And also you can do that with another tool at the moment. So is important in this code because, the theory is in the theory is important school as, as to lead to teach. 00:21:54:05 - 00:22:33:10 Unknown Start knowledge of AI. The first and the first. The to say that the you can, reinforce the abstract knowledge with practice and if you have demo, industrial ready and business ready tools, you can understand better. And the at the end is not the, the main important thing for a school, but it helps. You are ready for, company, because if you go to a company and they, you can provide the, the demonstration that you can develop an application as you do in apex. 00:22:33:12 - 00:23:04:07 Unknown Many Sara applications inside the company. Not so well developed as a, develop it also in, in education. And then when battlement so it's too easy also to find a job if you have portfolio a done in epic. Absolutely. And that's great information for our students and faculty. Thank you so much, Roberto, for giving us your time today. 00:23:04:09 - 00:23:35:12 Unknown For sharing your expertise. On apex, I know you're an oracle case. You're a true believer in apex. And you've been fantastic for all of our students and faculty in SC in particular. And I really want to thank you and my colleague Robert Bertelli for being part of this podcast. Thank you so much. And for those of you who are listening who may not be familiar with Oracle Academy, please take a look at our website and see if there's any resources that you think will be useful to you and your students. 00:23:35:18 - 00:23:55:04 Unknown Once again, many thanks to Roberto. And thank you so much. And thank you again soon. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening, and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

Unlocking the Role of an Account Cloud Engineer at Oracle What does it take to bridge technical expertise with real-world customer impact? In this episode, we dive deep into the role of the Account Cloud Engineer (ACE) at Oracle—a unique position that sits at the intersection of technology and customer engagement. Often misunderstood as solely technical, ACEs play a vital role in presales, partnering with sales teams to guide customers through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) solutions. From shaping architectural designs to providing ongoing support, ACEs are key to delivering value-driven cloud transformations. Listeners will discover: How ACEs collaborate with sales to co-design custom cloud solutions for clients The importance of soft skills—like communication, collaboration, and curiosity—alongside technical acumen What a typical day looks like for an ACE, including demos, workshops, customer calls, and problem-solving How cloud certifications, mini-courses, and real-world experience can jump-start your cloud career Why asking the right questions helps uncover and solve customers' real challenges We also spotlight the Generation Oracle (GenO) program—a global initiative dedicated to launching tech careers for people from all backgrounds. Whether you're a student, educator, or career switcher, GenO offers structured training and direct pathways into dynamic roles such as ACE, sales, consulting, and more. Ready to jumpstart your cloud journey? Explore Oracle Academy's free cloud curriculum and certifications, and check out Academy Bytes for bite-sized learning. Whether you're pursuing a career in cloud or curious about the world of presales, this episode is the perfect place to begin. Resources Mentioned: Oracle Academy : Free cloud curriculum and resources for educators and students Oracle University : Training and certification Generation Oracle Careers : Entry paths into Oracle -------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00:00:00 - 00:00:35:10 Unknown Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy prepares the next generation workforce. 00:00:35:11 - 00:01:04:04 Unknown I'm your host, Rick Blake, our being the Oracle Academy program manager for the Benelux and the region. So what we're going to discuss today, in this episode, we're exploring what it is really like to work in cloud tech, especially in the AI's role at Oracle. Lily will share her journey into tech, what the job involves day to day, and some honest advice for students and educators thinking about careers in this space. 00:01:04:06 - 00:01:26:20 Unknown Lily Griffin works in Oracle for three years, currently program manager for Oracle Academy for the UK and the Nordics. Previous to this, Lily worked as an account Cloud engineer for Oracle in the UK. Today we will discuss what an Account Cloud Engineer is and Lily's experience in the role. Lily, are you ready? I'm ready. Very good. Let's start. 00:01:26:20 - 00:01:53:15 Unknown Lily, a warm welcome to this podcast. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to learn from you. From your knowledge and your experiences. So to kick it off, Lily, if I look at the top 50 global technical roles, I can see that data and cloud are strongly represented in the top ten jobs. Even in various roles. Can you please explain what an account cloud engineer and as we call it, is? 00:01:53:16 - 00:02:25:09 Unknown Yeah, of course they as mentioned, Ace stands for Account Cloud engineer. And at Oracle it's a pre-sales role. So that means that you're involved before a sale happens. You're working with customers to help them understand Oracle's cloud offering, guiding them through, solutions, architecture and product features. I guess what's great is that you're involved, that your involvement doesn't end once the deal is signed. 00:02:25:11 - 00:02:51:01 Unknown You're sort of. You continued to be the customer's technical point of contact for Oracle Cloud infrastructure, and it becomes very consistent relationship so they know who to reach out to if they have any questions. Need guidance or want to explore any other capabilities. I think that ongoing support helps build trust and makes the role feel really rewarding. 00:02:51:03 - 00:03:15:14 Unknown It's a technical role, but it's also very people focused. So you might be talking about networking in one call and chat bots in the next. So you need to really comfortable switching gears and sort of having a wide range of conversations. I'd also say you don't work alone either. So as an ace, you're paired with one or more one or more sales reps. 00:03:15:16 - 00:03:41:03 Unknown And the ones sort of driving the sales process of building relationships and creating opportunities. You're their technical counterpart, so you're helping shape the solution and making sure it fits into the customer's needs. When it works well, it's a real partnership. And while it's definitely a technical role, it's important to mention soft skills as they are just as important. 00:03:41:05 - 00:04:09:05 Unknown So communication, problem solving, collaboration. And those are kind of the key ones. And you're not just exploiting tech, you're helping helping people make decisions on standing value and feeling confident in the solution that you're offering. Good at Lily. Interesting. That sounds indeed like balancing both technical and soft skills. How do you find this job as an ace and what is it? 00:04:09:05 - 00:04:33:03 Unknown Was it a rule you saw yourself doing? Well, if you'd asked me ten years ago what I'd be doing now, I definitely wouldn't have said cloud engineer or program manager for Oracle Academy. For that matter. But, I didn't originally plan to go to university. And at the last minute, I signed up for a business management undergraduate course at my local college. 00:04:33:05 - 00:04:59:01 Unknown So in the UK, that's typically for students aged 16 to 18 straight after secondary school. However, my particular college did, did degree level, courses, and I lived at home and I spent three years learning the ins and outs of business. And when I graduated, I'll be honest, I still didn't know what I wanted to do. 00:04:59:03 - 00:05:20:22 Unknown And I was really lucky to go traveling after university. And I came back a lot earlier than I expected due to Covid. So when I got back, I still had no idea what direction I want to take. And honestly, I don't think we talk about that enough. I feel like the pressure to have it all figured out. 00:05:21:00 - 00:05:43:10 Unknown And there's often that expectation that you should know exactly what you want to do. And I felt that's, like, rarely the case. Oh, maybe that was just for me, I don't know. But eventually, my business spring kicked in and I started doing some research about what industries were growing and what careers were in demand at that time. 00:05:43:12 - 00:06:06:05 Unknown And the answer felt quite clear to me. It was technology. So I felt like you could see that it was booming for a while, but I didn't have the soft skills to break in. During lockdown, I started sort of teaching myself Python. A little bit of all, doing some online courses, reading textbooks and eventually deciding to take a on a conversion. 00:06:06:05 - 00:06:30:05 Unknown Masters in Data Science. That one year completely changed my career path and led me to my first job as a data analyst. So straight out of university. And then a year later, I joined Oracle through the Generation Oracle program, which led me to the Ace role. Thank you, Lily, for sharing your experiences in an open and transparent way. 00:06:30:07 - 00:06:54:14 Unknown I think this is really relevant for students, young adults on their way to their first entry level job. S on paper, starting a career looks like it's a straight line. In practice, it could look like a road full of twists and turns, isn't it? So, Lily, I understand this Generation Oracle program was relevant for you. Could you brief explain what Generation Oracle is? 00:06:54:16 - 00:07:22:06 Unknown Yes. So generation Oracle or Gen two, as we often call it, is a global career program run ins of many countries. So it offers roles, across a wide range of disciplines, including sales, customer success, cloud engineering and consulting. And what's great is that it open. It's open to anyone looking to start or switch a career in tech. 00:07:22:10 - 00:07:53:17 Unknown So for God, less of your age or background, the program gives you structured training over a couple of years, and by the end you sort of move into that role or something similar within Oracle. For me, it was an incredible opportunity and it really gave me the foundation I needed to become a fully fledged ace. I will say as well, if you're curious to hear any more about the Jono experience, then do keep an eye out because I've heard there's a dedicated Jedi podcast coming soon. 00:07:53:19 - 00:08:16:01 Unknown But you'll be able to hear from others who have gone through the same program. That sounds good. Lily will stay tuned for the general podcast a bit from another angle. Now, if I may. The Daisy, which is the Digital Economy and Society Index published by the European Commission, presents on entry level IT jobs and the digital skills gap. 00:08:16:05 - 00:08:48:15 Unknown A couple of interesting things, like around 40% of adults in the European Union lack basic digital skills. Many entry level IT roles now require more than just basic skills, as candidates need to know coding, cloud and analytics tools. This means also a lot of self-study being important to enter the IT job market. Lily, what advice would you give to someone aspiring to become an account Cloud Engineer? 00:08:48:19 - 00:09:18:06 Unknown Other particular attributes, qualification or experience that you think can really help someone succeed on this path? I'll start by saying this is just based on my own experience. It's not the only path for the only right answer, but from what I've learned in the role, having well-rounded soft skills is absolutely key. Being a strong communicator and a great collaborator makes sort of a huge difference. 00:09:18:08 - 00:09:43:20 Unknown You'll be working with a lot of different people every day. That's customers, sales reps, your wider team. And if communication isn't as your strong suit, it can be tricky. If you need to expand your skills, why not try sharing or asking for feedback from friends or work colleagues and try to be like an active listener, or find a mentor who can help you grow in that space. 00:09:43:22 - 00:10:21:05 Unknown I would say one skill I find especially useful is being an expert questioner, for which I think I'm still still building on. But when you speak to customers, you might not always know exactly like where their pain points are or how to articulate those challenges. So asking the right questions helps you sort of uncover what's really going on, and can sort of let you offer the best possible solution for them in terms of qualifications, I'd say that they can definitely help, but they're not always essential. 00:10:21:10 - 00:10:51:14 Unknown Depending on your pathway into the role, a relevant degree or apprenticeship can give you a solid foundation. For example, in cloud infrastructure. But cloud is a huge space, and you might actually find yourself drawn into a specific area like network, compute, storage or disaster recovery. So doing maybe mini courses would be maybe a good recommendation and can sort of be a great way to explore those areas further. 00:10:51:16 - 00:11:16:03 Unknown Something else I think is important to mention is, like most large vendors also offer professional certifications, so that will help you focus on that specific cloud platforms. For example, Oracle University has professional certifications that you can take. And as you might already know, Oracle Academy is a brilliant way to kickstart your learning, especially with the cloud curriculum. 00:11:16:05 - 00:11:39:18 Unknown And the Academy bites. Lastly, I will say, it helps to have a basic understanding of sales because you're not you may not be the sales person, but you are in the pre-sales world. So knowing how sales reps build opportunities and manage pipeline gives you an edge really, and can help you support them better. Understand the bigger picture. 00:11:39:20 - 00:12:04:09 Unknown There's always this difference between theory and practice, as in books give the framework, but reality fills in the details. For most students, it is difficult to envision a day in a life. As an IT consultant, you have been a student and an ace. Can you please describe how does a day in the life of an ace look like? 00:12:04:11 - 00:12:31:00 Unknown Yeah. So a day in a life of an ace could be pretty varied, as I've mentioned. And that's both exciting and at times a bit overwhelming. You're speaking to customers regularly, whether that's a zoom email or phone, and not everyone you talk to is super technical. So one of those key skills is being able to explain complex ideas in a way that makes sense to different people, or day to day basis. 00:12:31:00 - 00:12:58:06 Unknown You're going to be working closely with your sales reps and then the ones driving the deals. So you need to be there to help support each other and you're going to come in from a technical side. You bounce ideas around, solve problems together, and actually help customers figure out what cloud solution works best for them. Some days you might be giving a demo, walking someone through Oracle Analytics or running a workshop on cloud security. 00:12:58:08 - 00:13:31:17 Unknown Other days you might be prepping for meetings, catching up with your manager, or researching something new because a customer's ask the question and you didn't know the answer to it. And, that's totally normal too. For me, the best part was the people. I love building relationships with customers and seeing how I'll work makes a difference. I also got to go to conferences, help out on the stands, and do like live demos, which was nerve wracking at first, but such a confidence based, I will say on a day to day. 00:13:31:18 - 00:13:53:03 Unknown The trickiest part was for me, the variety. OCI offers a lot and you're not expected to know everything, but you do need to be flexible. I sometimes have multiple customer calls in a day, each on completely different topics. And it was. It was quite a challenge, really. But it kept things interesting and helped me grow really quickly. 00:13:53:05 - 00:14:19:16 Unknown This is a relevant, dynamic and also fun job. That is clear. What did you learn as an account cloud engineer? When I first started out as an ace. I'll be honest, I was lacking confidence. And I think the idea of presenting to customers did feel quite intimidating. I was worried. They theorized for me, that I'd come across as inexperienced or that my. 00:14:19:16 - 00:14:48:14 Unknown No, to sort of get the better of me. But I was was lucky. I had a brilliant manager and a supportive team who sort of encouraged me, to push myself. I never really will forget that moment when I was assigned to my first consuming customer. And that's someone that's already using Oracle Cloud and I had to prepare a demo, in apex, walking through some new features. 00:14:48:16 - 00:15:12:21 Unknown And I've been practicing it for weeks. And I knew the content inside out, but the nerves were still there. And on the day of the meeting, we started with some, like, conversation. Asked about the weekend, eased into things, and then it was my turn and I had to get a demo. And you know what? It went really well. 00:15:12:23 - 00:15:41:02 Unknown The internet didn't crash. I didn't figure out my lines. No one died, which at the time felt like a very real possibility. And over time, I sort of built a great relationship with that customer. What I learned from experience was customers are human, too, and they're just like you. They have lives, personalities, and they really appreciate authenticity. 00:15:41:04 - 00:16:10:08 Unknown The more I spoke with different customers, the less scary it became. So this is just one story of many, but it really captures how much confidence I gained in the ace role. Learning to trust myself, even when I felt unsure. And it also reminded me of how important it is to have people around you that support you, who you can ask for help and who can help you grow not just professionally, but personally too. 00:16:10:10 - 00:16:35:16 Unknown Thank you, Lily, for your again, open, honest and transparent response. Again, very relevant, I think, for students and young adults moving to the labor markets. Lily, we're heading towards the finish line of this podcast. I would like to close with this very last relevant question. If you could give one advice to faculty or students, what would it be? 00:16:35:18 - 00:17:05:05 Unknown Okay, big question to end, but, I'd say take on as many opportunities as you can, whether they're in technology like Oracle Academy, or something completely unrelated, you never know where they'll lead. Some of the biggest turning points in my career came from saying yes to things that I wasn't sure I was ready for. I wouldn't be where I am now without taking a few risks and trying something new. 00:17:05:07 - 00:17:30:05 Unknown And even if it doesn't work out exactly how you imagined. You will learn something valuable along the way. Thank you, Lily, so much for giving the listeners the opportunity to learn more about the Asal and how to get into it. If I quickly wrap up and summarize the main points of this episode, I would say that the Account Cloud engineer at Oracle is a pre sales role. 00:17:30:07 - 00:17:56:13 Unknown You're working with customers to help them understand Oracle's cloud offerings, guiding them through solutions, architecture, and product features. The career path to it varies. In this episode, we learned that it could be straight and paper twisted in practice. So as a student, it's not needed to have your career spelled out up front. Develop yourself along the way with trainings and courses and an open mind. 00:17:56:15 - 00:18:29:09 Unknown This is also confirmed by the latest Future of Jobs Report 2025. In this world Economic Forum publication that specifically discusses entry level ID roles. It is mentioned that continuous re and upscaling to words, advanced digital and IEE driven competencies is relevant. Last but not least, wrapping up experience the fun of an ace job role being top notch, innovative and future driven. 00:18:29:11 - 00:18:57:22 Unknown Finalizing. To our listeners, I encourage you to visit our website, academy.oracle.com to learn more about Oracle Academy for educational institutes on all levels worldwide. I also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. Feel free to share this with your educational friends as well. Also, please follow Oracle Academy on Instagram and Facebook just to keep up with all our activities together with our new members. 00:18:58:00 - 00:19:11:11 Unknown Thank you so much. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

AI is driving a remarkable transformation throughout the industry, delivering unprecedented productivity gains and enabling rapid insights from vast amounts of data. In this two-episode season premiere, Tirthankar Lahiri, SVP of Mission-Critical Data and AI Engines, discusses how Oracle AI Vector and embedded machine learning search are harnessing the power of AI to unlock value from enterprise data, and allow developers to build sophisticated RAG and Agentic frameworks that leverage the full power of the converged database architecture of Oracle Database — including its class-leading scalability, fault-tolerance, and enterprise-grade security. Furthermore, Oracle database provides several mechanisms to make data "AI-ready" by enabling declarative data intent for AI. In this session, we will describe these techniques, and more, to explain how to truly build an AI for data solution in this rapidly changing AI landscape! ------------------------------------ Episode Transcript: 00:00:00:00 - 00:00:34:07 Unknown Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy prepares the next generation's workforce. 00:00:34:09 - 00:01:03:23 Unknown I'm your host, Tara Pierce. This is the first of two episodes on AI for data when data meets intelligence. Our guest speaker is to thank Carly Harris, senior vice president for mission critical data and AI engines at Oracle. Here's responsible for the data engine for Oracle database, including areas like AI, vector search, indexing and data compression. He also manages the Oracle Times ten in memory and the Oracle NoSQL database product teams to thank her. 00:01:03:23 - 00:01:33:13 Unknown Has 30 years of experience in the database industry and has worked on a variety of areas such as performance, scalability, manageability, caching, in-memory architectures and developer focused functionality. He has 71 issued and several pending patents. A bachelor's in computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology and a master's in electrical engineering from Stanford University. In the first episode to thank our talks about how data makes AI intelligent and how enterprises are using AI to get greater value from their data. 00:01:33:15 - 00:01:59:19 Unknown Over to you to thank her. Hi. Hey, guys. Thank you very much for joining. It's a great pleasure to be presenting AI for data. This is an exciting time in technology. AI is ubiquitous. AI changes everything. And I actually makes data intelligent. Let's talk about that today. So you know Oracle is working on AI. As many of you know, at many levels in the enterprise stack. 00:01:59:21 - 00:02:31:22 Unknown We have AI initiatives for applications, AI initiatives for services. I for data. And we're building a lot of AI infrastructure, as you seen from the news. Now I'm going to focus on AI for data. That's the focus of my presentation today. How we bring AI, the power of AI and unleash it on enterprise data. So Oracle's goal is to make AI for data extremely simple for basically everything. 00:02:32:00 - 00:02:54:08 Unknown So no matter what kind of end user you are, whether you're an expert, an AI, or a developer, or a DBA random list, every single persona should be able to leverage AI for data. We want to make it possible for all applications to leverage AI for data and benefit all workloads with the AI for data. So this is the goal that we have for AI for data. 00:02:54:08 - 00:03:25:05 Unknown Now, there's again basically two classic kinds of AI in the classical sense. So let's quickly talk about one before I get to what's new. So the traditional AI, was basically called algorithmic AI. Algorithmic here is based on machine learning models, typically non neural net designed to do predictions classifications, forecasting etc. and for data science people, you know that there's many different machine learning algorithms. 00:03:25:07 - 00:03:44:06 Unknown And these are all now available in Oracle database. So if you want you can use one of these models. This is the ever evolving list. You can use one of these models to load to first of all to train, you know, a sorry, you could use one of these algorithms. Excuse me. I keep that in the trunk. 00:03:44:08 - 00:04:05:22 Unknown These are algorithms. You can use one of these to train models and then to run inferencing using these models. So you imagine you can take, you know, linear linear regression. The algorithm used that to train a model and then applied that to data in real time to basically do predictions. So that's what in database machine learning lets you do. 00:04:06:00 - 00:04:30:18 Unknown And we've had this, capability for a while now. So what is new is something called I vector search, which is the primary focus of a presentation today. And this is newer, you know, and if this is beyond classical machine learning. So basically yeah vector search the new technology that enables searching for data by semantics rather than values. 00:04:30:20 - 00:04:54:11 Unknown The why why is this important? Because if you look at what databases traditionally do, for those of you who've been in the database field or have studied databases, databases essentially do what we call value based searches, where given a value, they can search by that value, like for instance, finding the revenue by each product. That's a very typical search you run inside of a database. 00:04:54:13 - 00:05:22:10 Unknown And they've excelled at this through various, you know, techniques like query optimization, SQL document processing, etc.. However, there is an ever increasing volume of unstructured data which you really can't search by value, but they have to be searched by semantics or meaning, like, you know, photos or images or description. Long complex textual descriptions. There's no real value that you can search those with. 00:05:22:10 - 00:05:52:08 Unknown Effectively, you need to search them essentially by their semantic content, not by the value content. For instance, finding products that match a particular photo or match a description that's not really something a database could do very well in the past. And this is a very important, an ever growing use case, because, you know, businesses need to do this today on a routine basis, forgetting about AI just in general to keep the business running in a healthy fashion. 00:05:52:10 - 00:06:25:14 Unknown There's a lot of examples of use cases where a business needs a search its data by, sort of the semantics. For instance, if you know, you have parts going into the sub line for manufacturing, the photo, the part should, quickly tell you whether that part might be defective, when customers log in to e-commerce sites, then when you browse products, so you try to check out a certain product, there is a desire from the e-commerce site to see what else they could then recommend to you in real time. 00:06:25:16 - 00:06:43:19 Unknown These are all examples. Another one is, of course, biometrics. You know, I'm coming in to the airport. I need to, you know, I go through facial recognition. They want to make sure that I'm the person I said I am when I, you know, when I submitted my visa application. So all of these cases require semantic search, not value based search. 00:06:43:21 - 00:07:11:12 Unknown And, vector searches. Exactly. That enable searching data based semantics. That's precisely what it does. And it does that using a construct primitive known as a vector, which is very simple actually. You know, if you think about this, the beauty of this is the basic concept is very easy, very simple. A vector is simply a long string of numbers that capture the semantics of much more complex data. 00:07:11:12 - 00:07:36:14 Unknown And they're produced by something I call black magic deep learning, machine learning models that take this, you know, unstructured set of data on the left, apply these complex algorithms and machine learning algorithms to that data and then outcomes a vector. It's actually incredible that this this actually works, that you can take something as sophisticated as a Picasso painting and convert that into a string of numbers. 00:07:36:14 - 00:07:59:16 Unknown That represents that painting. That's basically what a vector does. It's a string of numbers encoding the semantics. And once you do that, well, how do you then measure for similarity? The way you do that is by measuring the mathematical distance between the vectors. Now for those of you who've of course all of you are familiar with the vector concept, I'm sure from mathematics and physics. 00:07:59:18 - 00:08:22:09 Unknown Basically, vectors are points in multidimensional space, and there's many different ways to measure distance between them. You know, a simple example, a simple distance function is what we call Euclidean squared. We just take the square of the difference, the sum of the differences of each coordinate. That's a that's one distance for a function. However, there's many formula for distance. 00:08:22:11 - 00:08:45:07 Unknown And each machine learning model and each data scientist prefers a different one. Let's talk about how vectors get used in the real world. Now, if you think about, a very simple business example, I know that most of you not not, you know, business people, but most of you use products and sometimes, you know, products go wrong and you have this file, you know, ask for help from customer support. 00:08:45:08 - 00:09:10:11 Unknown Support incidents are very complex, documents, very complex entities. They involve a lot of different attributes. And typically looking for similarity for support incidents. Is this tricky? So a very simple example here is you take a simple incident and you encode the different properties of the incident as a vector. That's really what vector embedding models do. 00:09:10:11 - 00:09:36:17 Unknown They take the different aspects of data and they convert each aspect to a numerical value. Now and these are called dimensions on the left these numbers now in practice of course in the real world nothing is as simple as this. This is a very simple example, highly idealized, but it shows you you can take a fairly complex structure, like a super incident document, which has lots of fields and lots of textual content, and convert that into a vector. 00:09:36:23 - 00:10:01:12 Unknown Okay, that's let's just take that as our baseline example for what I'm about to show you next. When you have collapse incidents into two dimensional vectors, they might look like this. So if you have incidents for laptops running slowly, maybe an incident for a desktop that's crashing, it might look like this on into the space. 00:10:01:14 - 00:10:26:19 Unknown And basically the similarity property of vectors is that things that are more similar have a smaller distance between them. So in this example, for instance, support incidents for laptops are more similar than those for desktops. And that's why you can use vector distance as a measure of similarity of these really complex components. So you just seen how this was done. 00:10:26:19 - 00:10:51:09 Unknown Now taken this complex entity known in the support incident broken that down into vectors and then measured distances between the. Now why are we doing this in the Oracle database. There's a lot of vector database out there. Like builders pinecone etc. and lots of dedicated specialists do this really well. And that's all they do really, is measure vector similarity between two given vectors. 00:10:51:11 - 00:11:14:06 Unknown But we think the big requirement we have is in business applications, sometimes you need to combine semantic search and value based search. And that requires both the search to run together. So you could imagine your business database, take the incident data, move that to a vector database and run the search there. That's one way of doing it. 00:11:14:08 - 00:11:38:21 Unknown However, you have to send other data as well because sometimes you want to filter the customer support similarity. Search with customer information. Maybe I only want customers for a certain range region, or I only want to look for incidents for a certain product. Those are things that you're better off with other kinds of data added to the search. 00:11:38:23 - 00:12:02:07 Unknown So this way, if you see what's what happens is you have to send a lot of extra data because you don't know what might be asked, what kind of question does my support incident question involve? Customer information, product information, region information. All of that has to be sent to the vector database. And this causes some issues. It makes the data still adds a bunch of complexity. 00:12:02:09 - 00:12:39:04 Unknown It also compromises security because now your vector database becomes the weakest link in your security architecture. As you know, security works in the following way. You're as secure as your weakest link. You're as secure your house, as secure as your weakest window. So the minute you add more products to your ecosystem, you end up compromising security. And of course, or databases like Oracle have a lot more capabilities, like, you know, first of all, much more sophisticated query, much better fault tolerance, much better security than dedicated vector specialists. 00:12:39:06 - 00:13:04:03 Unknown So what we said was instead of customers using a vector database to search data by semantics, let's put that functionality into the Oracle database to begin with. That way, every search runs on current data. You don't need to guess what data might be needed because it's all there in the database. There is no data movement required, no need to manage multiple products, and no compromises. 00:13:04:03 - 00:13:32:23 Unknown The security and fault tolerance by having your vectors inside your you know, production enterprise database. And now let's get into some, you know, under-the-hood stuff. Now what's once I've done this? Well, what kind of queries can I run? How do I care about similarity. But turns out SQL is really, really powerful. I would encourage everyone here who has not taken the class involving SQL to brush up on SQL. 00:13:33:01 - 00:13:56:15 Unknown You know, because SQL is actually a galactic intergalactic language standard for declarative simple queries, as this example shows. If I want to find support incidents that are similar to my support by current incident, this is the query I vectorize my current incident using the You know, the search vector. Imagine that's the vector. So I'm just going to show you make sure the pointer works here. 00:13:56:17 - 00:14:15:10 Unknown Can you guys see the pointer here. There we go. Yeah. So the search vector is a vectorization of my my own incident let's say. So vector is that I create that. And then I find the vectors and I rank them by distance from the search fit. And I say I only want the top ten. So that's how SQL works. 00:14:15:10 - 00:14:42:12 Unknown It's very simple, extremely user friendly and very easy to express sophisticated searches with. So this gets me the top ten incidents closest to me. Now let's get more interesting. I'm only I only want to look at incidents that are similar that are for a laptop. So then I would just take that same SQL statement and extend that with a simple join and filter by the product type laptop. 00:14:42:14 - 00:15:07:23 Unknown Okay, so that makes it clear to the database engine that don't, you know, not written incidents that don't correspond to laptops. And these are again ranked by the same vector distance. And again I only want the first ten rows. And you can see that you can keep expanding on this. Maybe I only care about vector incidents for laptops reported by customers in Las Vegas, because I happen to be in Las Vegas. 00:15:08:01 - 00:15:25:17 Unknown Las Vegas is kind of a hot air in the summer, for those of you who've been there, and maybe there are some unique issues for Las Vegas customers. So I can add a filter again on Las Vegas that customers to the list of joint tables, and then run the vector search on that joint result. This is the beauty of SQL. 00:15:25:17 - 00:15:53:04 Unknown SQL is decorative and SQL is extensible and composable. And you can create really sophisticated queries with very simple building blocks. This is if you look at what's on the right, it's very powerful because this combines vector data with production at the relational data in a few lines of SQL, providing you with a single solution where everything is consistent. 00:15:53:04 - 00:16:16:16 Unknown There's nothing stale here. Every customer, every product, every support incident is current. And I think developers can learn to use this within minutes. There's there's nothing new to learn for anybody who has even basic SQL knowledge. So this is the power of putting vectors into the production enterprise database and running basically this type of converge SQL on it. 00:16:16:18 - 00:16:38:12 Unknown Okay, let's now get into a little deeper dive under the hood into AI vector search itself. This is, designed more from a user end user standpoint, but I'll highlight some areas that might be of academic interest that, might do what exploration or learning more about. And there's tons of literature out there in the field and lots of stuff that's evolving daily. 00:16:38:14 - 00:16:58:02 Unknown But hopefully this will give you a high level idea of what the space includes. Okay, so I vector search from a user point of view. An Oracle database basically contains consists of four steps. You first have to take the data that you want to search and encode the data into vectors. Right. That's that's of course the step one. 00:16:58:02 - 00:17:28:16 Unknown And that's done using something we call vector and the call embedding models or vector embedding models interchangeably. Embedding is a natural language processing term from the 80s. I think it's become a standard synonym for vectors. So vectors, vector embeddings, same thing. You first encode the data, then the the data you're searching for. Like if you have a question you want to ask, you encode that search data, the question using the vector with that same model. 00:17:28:16 - 00:17:53:01 Unknown So whatever model was used to embed the original data, like if I have a list of images of, you know, I'm going to search, I use a certain vector model to encode them into vectors. What I want to search for a certain image after is encode that image using that same model. Then of course, I find the k nearest vectors ordered by distance to the question, and then return the data corresponding to the vector. 00:17:53:01 - 00:18:22:17 Unknown That's the way vector search works. So let's talk about vector generator. I want to skip some of the details and the vector generation. So typically for a database application there are three ways customers can do this. One is they can use pre-created vectors. There's a lot of data that is already vectorized. And if you already have a tier of data with the image or text and its vector, you can load that directly into the database. 00:18:22:19 - 00:18:47:08 Unknown No problem. The second thing is often you want to use, third party embedding service like OpenAI. They provide Rest endpoints to generate vector embeddings from your data, and you can do that from the database using a political function. And of course, the third approach is you can load the model into the database and do the vector generation inside the model. 00:18:47:10 - 00:19:16:03 Unknown Okay. So that's the way vector embeddings are produced. So I know very simply the benefit of this, approach is that you can make the database the API hub for your operation. So even if the vectors are being produced outside the database, like using OpenAI or come here or Google's embedding models, you can do that call out from the database so that you end user doesn't need to do two different things. 00:19:16:05 - 00:19:41:08 Unknown They can supply the credentials to the database and have the database essentially generate the embeddings directly from source data. So this this simple function takes, like a support incident description and combined creates the and creates the vector for it using the supplied embedding credential. This is an open AI credential, for instance, as an example. So very simple. 00:19:41:10 - 00:20:10:02 Unknown It keeps everything simple, consistent and SQL oriented. Now if you want to run everything inside the database, you can load models into the database. And there is a technique known as Onnx open Neural Network exchange. That's the standard sort of runtime that supports vector embedding generation. So step one is you load that model into the database, you whatever model you want. 00:20:10:02 - 00:20:35:20 Unknown This is a very common model for of Transformers. It's called it's a nice long name. All Alex. L6 v2, you can load the model into the database using the spill SQL function. And then once the model is in the database, you can use that model in the database to convert that incident descriptions, into a into a vector. 00:20:35:22 - 00:20:55:15 Unknown So this vector embedding function runs and said the database and produced vectors. Very simple okay. So now we know how to get vectors from data. Hopefully. What do we not do with them. Well the first thing to do is to store them because vectors have to go somewhere persistent. They for long term search by the database. So let's see how do we store the vectors. 00:20:55:17 - 00:21:19:03 Unknown So vectors are a new data type in Oracle. We basically can declare columns with the vector type. We can optionally give it more details like how big, how big is the vector and what are the types of each number in the vector. These are all things that we can support inside the database. Specific specify how many dimensions. 00:21:19:05 - 00:21:45:12 Unknown This is really a property of the vector embedding model. So the more in some models have smaller dimension and some larger. But depending on the model that you intend to use, you should use, vectors of that size. However, you can also just avoid specifying the dimension count and dimension type altogether because, you know, models change rapidly. 00:21:45:14 - 00:22:05:20 Unknown And if you don't want to change your table definitions, you could leave the model, the dimension cut unspecified. And this format allows you to store vectors of any size and type inside the column so that if the model changes, your schema doesn't change, which is very useful. And also this lets you support multiple models in the same column. 00:22:05:20 - 00:22:30:23 Unknown For instance, I might have a model for Japanese Brazilians versus English estimates, and I have a column of data in the table that tells me what type of resume is being stored. And I can use different models for those those rows. So that's a very powerful capability allowing vectors to be mixed and matched. Okay. As I said earlier, the main operation is vector distance, but I have two different vector values. 00:22:31:01 - 00:22:59:08 Unknown The, only thing that really makes sense to doing them is to see how similar they are using distance. And again, there's many vector distance formula. There's Euclidean cosine similarity. They're all embedding model specific. So each model is this defined or is designed rather to use a certain distance function to measure similarity. And you know, so vectors for words like tiger and lion will be closer to each other than vectors for tiger and apple as an example. 00:22:59:08 - 00:23:24:11 Unknown So this gives you the similarity property with which you can search for data by semantics. Pick. Now the real rocket science behind vector search is called vector indexes. Let's talk about that. This is the this is the part that's really interesting from an academic standpoint. Vector indexes allow you to make similarity searches happen hundreds of times faster. 00:23:24:13 - 00:23:45:09 Unknown That's why you need the indexes. So let's talk about them. So you could of course search the entire column and every value exhaustively in a vector column. And you'd get good results. But that's done slowly. But we index the vectors so that you get much faster access, and you find your top k nearest neighbors much more quickly. 00:23:45:11 - 00:24:17:12 Unknown So let's talk about the neighbor graph vector index. We have two types of indexes. Let's talk about the graph index first here. This is basically a form a type of index where the index is stored as a graph where edges between the vectors represent vector similarity. This is an in-memory index designed for high accuracy and speed. It's not meant for very large data, but today memories are getting pretty big so it can store a reasonable amount of data. 00:24:17:17 - 00:24:44:13 Unknown And one example of a graph vector index that's very popular is called each NSW hierarchical navigable small boat split Everton cluster. But it has sort of become the B-tree of indexes. It looks a bit like this, a just under the hood. So if you the way the ancient structure works, it has it's a multi layer graph and each layer is a subset of the layer below it. 00:24:44:15 - 00:25:10:00 Unknown So let's erase all the vectors and layers one and two and three have a subset of those data. The first has only one the top layer. Sorry. So what happens is you you begin your search from the top left. You, you go down a level each time to find the nearest neighbor, the next layer. And once you get to the last there, you will turn that vector and its neighbors. 00:25:10:02 - 00:25:31:17 Unknown This is sort of the way the high level description, how the vector indexed application works for graph based vector indexes. It makes the vector search very, very fast because this basically is a log n traversal compared to being an order n traversal. So it's very fast and especially because these are basically this pointers of memory. The navigation happens of memory speed. 00:25:31:19 - 00:25:56:14 Unknown So this is the probably the fastest vector index up there. The other approach when if you have very large data that does not fit a memory, the way to search that is another vector index that's partitioned based here. What we do is we take the vectors and we divide them into different groups or clusters or partitions based on vector similarity. 00:25:56:16 - 00:26:25:10 Unknown And one example is something called the inverted file index or IVF flat, which basically groups vectors into these clusters based on vector similarity and this essentially scales up to unlimited sizes of data. So each of these is faster, but it only works if your data fits in memory. IVF can handle basically terabytes and petabytes of data. And I'll give you a, a quick illustration of how IVF works. 00:26:25:10 - 00:26:48:22 Unknown It's very simple. So imagine I have a two dimensional set of vectors. The first step is to take these vectors and classify them into groups. And this is done using an algorithm called K-means clustering. It's a very familiar algorithm for those of you who've done data science, the machine learning K-means basically identifies k clusters given your two dimensional divide. 00:26:48:22 - 00:27:09:22 Unknown Given a data set, when you get a query vector that says find me the nearest neighbors, the first thing we do is instead of look at all the vectors, we first look at the nearest clusters to that vector. So we look at all the cluster distances by measuring the distance between the query vector and the middle of each clusters. 00:27:09:22 - 00:27:32:02 Unknown Let me go back a step. So these are clusters different clusters of vectors. Each of them have a has a centroid or a center of gravity. We defined that as basically the average of those vectors that lets us that measure the distance between the query vector to the center of gravity or centroid. And what we do is we find the nearest centroids. 00:27:32:04 - 00:27:58:01 Unknown In this case here two clusters that look like the the closest to the search vector. Once I've done that, then I can do a search within those clusters for the nearest vector. So what I did first was I reduced the search space by looking at only the nearest clusters, and then searching only within those clusters. And this is essentially how, you know, neighbor partition vector indexes work. 00:27:58:03 - 00:28:23:00 Unknown Very simple. Again, this works for unlimited, say, the data, the standard algorithms or heuristics for how many classes you want. Typically what happens is if you have n vectors altogether the number of clusters is square root of n. So that gets us a reduction in the search space by a quadratic amount. There's a simple DDL just to show you how this looks from an end user standpoint. 00:28:23:02 - 00:28:47:13 Unknown You basically define the vector index and you specify how you want the index to be organized and using what distance function. Now, what's new? What's in addition, Oracle is you can also specify how accurate you want the vector index to be. By default you can specify a default target accuracy. The more accurate the index, the slower the index construction is, but the better the result is. 00:28:47:15 - 00:29:13:01 Unknown So, it's easy for developers to specify because you could specify low level index parameters that only Data Science Scientist would understand, but an accuracy number is easy. Saying, hey, I want this index to be 95%. I can because this is meant for like facial recognition that border control. But if it's product recommendations, I might be okay with the lower accuracy in order to make the index construction faster. 00:29:13:01 - 00:29:40:13 Unknown So you can define the target accuracy based on your target use case. Thank you to thank. Ha. That's all for this episode. Please join us for episode two to hear the conclusion of ten class presentation. Until then, thank you for listening. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

In this episode host Tyra Peirce chats with Rolando Carrasco, an Oracle ACE Director based in Latin America. Rolando and Tyra speak about Multi-tenant cloud. What it is, what it isn't, and when it should be used. --------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00:00:00 - 00:00:34:01 Unknown Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students with in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy prepares the next generation's workforce. 00:00:34:03 - 00:01:02:16 Unknown I'm your host, Tyra Peirce. Today I'm joined by our Rolando Carrasco. Rolando is an Oracle Ace director based in Latin America. He has been in the IT industry for the past 25 years, working for companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. Then in 2010, he started his own consulting firm where he is currently the CTO. His work has been focused on distributed systems, working with several integration platforms, API management tools and the cloud. 00:01:02:18 - 00:01:29:06 Unknown He is a constant speaker at both local and global development conferences. Welcome, Rolando. Oh thank you Tyra. So to start off, can you give me a bit about your background and your current job role? Yes. Thank you Tyra. Now I'm currently the CTO for a Mexican consulting firm here in Mexico. The name is CES, and I've had this role for the past 15 to 16 years now. 00:01:29:08 - 00:02:07:13 Unknown And as you already mentioned, my experience is focused on distributed systems. And probably, I will say, the evolution of those type of needs in terms of integration in the cloud now. And I will say that I have a mixed profile in terms of, development, if you will, and also experience on sales and pre-sales and architecture, or so I will say that I have that type of hybrid more a rosary and my experience is being focused mostly and in the Latin American region, from Mexico to Brazil. 00:02:07:15 - 00:02:32:21 Unknown Today our focus is on, multi-tenancy and cloud computing. Can you tell me what a multi-tenancy is and cloud computing and how does it differ from single tenancy? I can say that multi-tenancy is the ability to have different organizations working separately, and that's the key. But we'll be using the same infrastructure okay. Even though they share this infrastructure. 00:02:32:23 - 00:02:57:07 Unknown The main thing, as I said, we already mentioned is that those different organizations are isolated. They can see each other, they can see their data. And I can say that normally service providers work in this fashion. They offer their services to several gateway stations or customers. And from the infrastructure standpoint, they share the infrastructure now along all those organizations. 00:02:57:09 - 00:03:25:08 Unknown And the difference, the difference between multi-tenancy and the single tenancy is that which single tenant, every organization use its own infrastructure. I mean, there is nothing to share between them or among them, but you need to deliver on a specific infrastructure for every single organization. So which follows on to my next question. Can you share a real world example of multi-tenant cloud implementations? 00:03:25:10 - 00:04:03:19 Unknown Yes, absolutely. I will say that the software as a service market and the software as a service, providers and application owns most of them. And I can say that both big companies such as Oracle and small companies or even startups, they use these type of model offering these, those type of services. For example, an email application and the one that we normally use, Outlook or Gmail or any of that type of email application is a clear example of then we all have an account. 00:04:03:21 - 00:04:26:22 Unknown The infrastructure is the same. We don't care as a user, we just use the service as its own, as it's been, offered to, to us. So, the users are not aware of that. And I will say that probably the users are not even interested in if it is a multi-tenancy or not, but all I what I was trying to I was trying sorry to explain. 00:04:27:00 - 00:04:51:19 Unknown Is that mostly those type of SaaS applications use this model. For example, maybe you or the audience are aware of applications such as Monday.com or Bitly. The shortener, URL application, or any other type of application that you normally use that you just use and you just subscribe to it. It is so very clear example of behind the scenes is working in a multi-tenancy fashion. 00:04:51:21 - 00:05:15:22 Unknown That actually makes sense. The Bitly one makes sense to me because I've used it before. And same with like my email. My email. Programs. I understand how that would work. Like, you access it one way, but you might be touching multiple clouds. So that's that's actually really, really fascinating for me. So on to my next question. Why do organizations choose a multi-tenant architecture over a single tenant one? 00:05:16:00 - 00:05:45:22 Unknown I will answer that in two ways. And the first one is for service providers. These multi-tenancy model may imply the reduction of several cost and operations because instead of provisioning dedicated infrastructure and all the consequences that it that it has, they use just one single, infrastructure and that single infrastructure is the one that they operate. They your grade and then they maintain. 00:05:46:00 - 00:06:13:17 Unknown But at the same time they isolate the organizations as as we mentioned in, in the past questions or in the previous questions. And the second thing is for organizations who create their own software, I mean, that they are looking to create a solution. They are building, an application they will like to or free to many customers, and they need to deliver it in, in such a way that they need to reduce their own cost. 00:06:13:19 - 00:06:43:18 Unknown Then probably they are going to choose these type of models because it is going to be not that expensive. And for example, in terms of Oracle technology, a Oracle's database is a very clear example of the unorganized organization, sorry, an organization that is looking to create an application which uses a database. But it happens that these database needs to be separated, be separated because the departments needs to be isolated. 00:06:43:18 - 00:07:10:23 Unknown Just to give an example, this type of organization can leverage from the Oracle database technology. And in the specific the database multi-tenant option one single database engine, but multiple databases running on that very same engine. So I would say that those two things are the ones that are going to make an organization to use this multi-tenancy model that is that also makes a lot of sense to me. 00:07:10:23 - 00:07:45:09 Unknown Like if you need to separate your databases, you want to separate your data, you want to make sure that it's controlled and then only accessible by a certain group of people. That also makes sense to me as well. Which leads to the next question how does multi-tenancy impact database management in cloud applications? I will say that it reduces the complexity of managing different databases with a whole set of infrastructure, because if you think about it and you have separate databases, then you need probably different persons to manage those different layers. 00:07:45:11 - 00:08:10:14 Unknown So in the Oracle database multi-tenancy model or in a database dependency model, it is just one single infrastructure. So you reduce the number of persons or the team that is managing the infrastructure. The second thing is the streamline is streamlining the database provisioning and the provisioning, because you just need to take care about let me say it in this way just as database. 00:08:10:14 - 00:08:38:22 Unknown So for it that's that's the there's the thing that you need to manage and you need to deploy or, or provision or the provision instead of the whole infrastructure. The third thing is to consolidate the database management. You are consolidating in a single group of persons and sometimes it is just one single DBA. You leave me managing different databases with, you know, very same infrastructure or the very same infrastructure. 00:08:39:00 - 00:09:07:01 Unknown You can also consolidate database monitoring. So you have a single glass of pane if you will, where you can check the different databases that you are running in this multi tenancy model, instead of having separated monitoring tools or monitoring applications, working on top of these different databases, you have one single glass of paint on modeling of new organization. 00:09:07:01 - 00:09:29:05 Unknown You will be easier because you already have the infrastructure. You just need to provision the database for this new department or organization and probably already mentioned it, but I think is is okay to repeat it to reduce the number of DBA is managing all that infrastructure. I like that, I like that it's all about streamlining and making sure that they you don't need as many resources. 00:09:29:06 - 00:09:48:01 Unknown Managing certain types of things like the DBA is can go out and expand into doing different types of work. And it's that's a little bit more interesting. Or you have like a, a person that is just an expert in one area, which I think is kind of helpless. You can spread your resources out and make them a little bit more nimble and flexible. 00:09:48:01 - 00:10:21:21 Unknown So which leads to my next question. What are the key performance challenges and a multi-tenant system, and how are they addressed in. This is one of the most relevant questions, and I will say that this is something that every time we think about the multi-tenancy model, we need to take care of these because it is good, obviously, and we've been highlighting all these benefits of having not one single infrastructure is sharing it among different organizations, but it happens that it is the same infrastructure. 00:10:21:21 - 00:11:07:15 Unknown So those multiple, organizations running on these very same infrastructure, are, if you will, fighting for those or competing for those available resources. And those organizations have or may have different dynamics. For example, an organization may be running batch processes while the other organizations are, having or are processing numerous transactions stream simultaneously. So you have different dynamics and that as a consequence, means that the CPU or the memory are using different ways in sometimes those different ways may block a process or may block the CPU. 00:11:07:15 - 00:11:44:05 Unknown So then you are probably going to hit a problem with that, because one organization problem may cause the other organization, which has nothing to do with the with the one who is having the problem. And then you are creating a little bit of chaos along or among those, those different organizations. So, so you need you need to be very clever on that regard and trying to take care about those different dynamics or identify those different dynamics, and then try to mix the best as you can, the infrastructure that is supporting those different customers. 00:11:44:07 - 00:12:08:23 Unknown So I will summarize that point, that very relevant point on different organizations, different dynamics. One single blocking process may create a chaos, along your different customers working on your multi-tenancy mode. I think that makes sense. And I think it talks about why communication and collaboration are key as you're going through in and setting up your your cloud. 00:12:08:23 - 00:12:44:17 Unknown And if you choose to go multi-tenancy, to choose your multi-tenancy cloud is to make sure that we communicate regularly and effectively. So my last question for you, and thank you so much for joining me today is if you could give one piece of advice to faculty or students, what would it be? I always suggest to try to have a fixed time to study technology on a daily basis, to try to have a moment in the day where you just dedicate that time, or on studying something, try to learn something new daily. 00:12:44:19 - 00:13:05:03 Unknown So try to make an assessment of yourself on a daily basis about what was the thing that you learned that day and if you didn't, and if you continue doing, in the next day, then probably do not going to feel okay. And then if the third day you are not learning something new, then probably you are going to identify a problem. 00:13:05:05 - 00:13:27:18 Unknown So always try to learn something new on a daily basis. Go to sleep and as yourself if you learn something new, as I already mentioned, try new technology or try technology, maybe this maybe is not new technology, but just try technology. Experiment with it. It's not going to happen anything if you fail with that, just try it and just try to understand it and try to learn. 00:13:27:18 - 00:14:01:20 Unknown As I mentioned, try to be active in events. No, not doesn't a speaker, but just try to attend different events and try to learn from others. I will say that. Thank you Alondra. I think that's a really wonderful answer. I think that being curious and being willing to try new things is is always really important, cause I think it helps us to learn more about the technology and not to be afraid as we're going through and trying to become, learn the latest and greatest, things, which is is very much one of those newer technologies is coming out. 00:14:01:20 - 00:14:28:15 Unknown So thank you to Rolando for being the guest today on the Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast. For more information, visit our website academy.oracle.com and subscribe to our podcast. Thanks for listening. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

Do you want to be a data engineer? In this episode, host Alba Joven speaks with Oracle Autonomous Database specialist Javier de la Torre Medina about what it takes to become an AI data engineer. Episode Transcript: 00:00:00:00 - 00:00:34:15 Unknown Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy, tech chat where we discuss how Oracle Academy prepares the next generation workforce. 00:00:34:17 - 00:00:57:14 Unknown I'm your host, Alba Joven. And in this episode, I'm joined by Javier de la Torre Medina, an Autonomous database specialist at Oracle. Today, Javier and I will be talking about how to become an AI data engineer. Welcome Javier. Thank you very much Alba a pleasure to have you today here on this nice chat. Javier before we dive in 00:00:57:15 - 00:01:20:15 Unknown Can you tell us a little bit about what's your background and what's your role at Oracle? Sure. So I have it already at Oracle 13 years ago so when I when I joined and having working a lot of positions and all of the data related. So I'm working as a big data specialist, a NoSQL specialist, Oracle database specialist. 00:01:20:17 - 00:01:44:11 Unknown So always having, working to, to help customers to build data architectures and solution which has the best approach. So to help them to, get the best value of the data. So normally my day, I do workshops to show the technology and demos to show it live, architecture diagram. I also I do a lot of proof of concepts. 00:01:44:13 - 00:02:07:17 Unknown That's to, to help them to, to build the solution that their looking for. So at the end, I always been, data related, but now I have a special focus with, autonomous database, which is our, product right now in the, in the markets. I understand that you are an expert in, you know, autonomous database for those who may not be familiar what exactly it is and why is such a game changer? 00:02:07:19 - 00:02:35:15 Unknown They are markets perception that Oracle is difficult. And you need a lot of gears and expertise. In order to start using this technology. And this is our game changer because we provide the Oracle database as so some access, an ERP or a CRM. But for the technology point of view it's access, because the idea of the goal of Oracle is you can start working directly with the data and forget about everything. 00:02:35:17 - 00:02:58:05 Unknown So Oracle automatically is in charge of putting the data is in charge and doing backups is in charge of doing all this kind of, of activities. And that's why I suddenly changer. Because so also one of the good thing is that there is a lot of configuration already done. So the idea is that you don't need to be an expert in Oracle in Uni in order to start using it. 00:02:58:07 - 00:03:18:07 Unknown Even if you left the university tomorrow, you can start using, create great applications, AI application that we'll talk later about it in a matter of minutes. And this is where the business see value because even in the, in the AI space. So we see that every day this a new something is changing or something is happening. 00:03:18:09 - 00:03:40:11 Unknown So to be up to date or to be able to adapt these new changes into your application or the business is very important. So that's why is the key difference from from there or a game changer for the autonomous database. Also, one of the key things is that, we're going to talk about this concept of data engineer. 00:03:40:13 - 00:04:00:16 Unknown So I think normally when we talk about the Oracle database, we are talking about database administrators. But this concept I think is one to disappear too. And data engineers. But the good things or if someone is a DBA and is listening to us is that the knowledge to do have is still is great because you need to work with the data you need to create. 00:04:00:18 - 00:04:23:09 Unknown Move the data you know the form of the data. So on this value you can use it is still as a data engineer there. But you can forget about all these tedious talks about patching, backups, upgrades or all these things that doesn't provide value. And normally it's a stopper to to innovate on the DBAs or not, the data engineers can, benefit about all these new capabilities. 00:04:23:09 - 00:04:42:22 Unknown The autonomous database is going to provide. You have mentioned the role of AI data engineer quite a bit. Can you explain how Oracle has achieved this role? So before going into the AI engineer, let me explain. What is a data engineer? If someone is coming from a DBA or have seen Oracle has only a database point of view. 00:04:43:00 - 00:05:03:03 Unknown So I was mentioning. So one of the goal of the Oracle with the autonomous database is to focus only on the data, which is really important. But also there is a concept that we call in the autonomous database is the convert data model. So that means that we can work with any datatype. We can work with Json, we can work with data spatial. 00:05:03:09 - 00:05:26:23 Unknown We can work with a relational. We can work with graph data. It doesn't matter. This is very important because many companies want to be a data driven company but become they become data movement company. So they move data from one product to another product. And then when the business came, I need a report by one yesterday I need to buy yesterday. 00:05:26:23 - 00:05:52:01 Unknown No, there was too late. No. And this is one of the benefits that Oracle has to to be able to avoid to move data. Unless you don't need it. But also we have, great graphical interface which is called Data Studio. So I was mentioning you before that even if you left the university, today, tomorrow you can start using the autonomous database and you can become a data engineer. 00:05:52:03 - 00:06:13:18 Unknown And this is because this suite of tools which are included for free, it is something very, very important with the autonomous database, allow us to go through the life cycle of the data engineer. So the lifecycle of a data engineer has three main stages, which is load data from a source of data transform the data will be data quality and reach it and so on. 00:06:14:00 - 00:06:36:16 Unknown And then to serve it as maybe we need to serve it to a BI person who has to, prepare a report for their business. Maybe you want to serve it with an internal application because we need it for HR, marketing or so on, or even including application for third parties. So this is really very important. And all these three stages are very important from a data engineer. 00:06:36:16 - 00:07:06:04 Unknown And you can achieve it very easily with a graphical interface which is called the the, the data studio. And what we say the I know with artificial intelligence. AI is transforming every industry. But what exactly is an AI data engineer. So have been talking about data engineer. So the AI engineer go a bit farther now, something that, I see, and I hear a lot is like a AI is not going to take your job, but someone who will use it. 00:07:06:04 - 00:07:28:18 Unknown Wait. So this is very, very, very important because this is going to boost productivity. But even if it boost productivity is very important to check what the AI is suggesting because it's not going to do all the job for for us. So this is very, very important. And also in the data studio, we have included, a lot of AI features that anybody can can use. 00:07:28:20 - 00:07:49:00 Unknown But something that I would like to highlight is that all the AI features that are included are open. So it means that I can work with any level in the market. You know that tomorrow, today, open AI is really cool, but tomorrow we have a three and then we have the IPsec and they're everywhere. Is, is is changing now. 00:07:49:02 - 00:08:10:01 Unknown So something which is very important is to say, okay, from a business point of view, I want to take this technology and use it as soon as possible. But I don't want to change all the processes that I have underneath. If you have to adapt or develop something every day, you will never get anything to production or anything useful no 00:08:10:03 - 00:08:26:17 Unknown And that's why in the database we are able to connect to any, and we are able to suggest or to work in order to improve this kind of pipelines or data load and all this kind of features that we like to highlight, you know, so this is very important. 00:08:26:19 - 00:08:50:17 Unknown I mean when we boost their productivity. But then the AI engineer go a bit farther because also on top of that we have the load transform on serve that I was mentioning before. The AI can do more things. One thing is to create synthetic data or fake data. Imagine that they have to create an application for an internal marketing department. 00:08:50:19 - 00:09:14:23 Unknown So I can use AI to generate the data model to generate the fake data. And the developer going to start working tomorrow directly. So this boost the productivity I don't have to worry too about, all these things are going to be a quickie. And also something that we can use in the autonomous database, which is very popular easily. We can work with that vector, database because the vector is a datatype is inside the autonomous database. 00:09:15:01 - 00:09:40:22 Unknown So, anybody is not familiar with the vector is that we provide is the information we provide to the NLM in order to provide, more, business related, answers. For example, we have PDFs, I have Excel. I have a lot of information, pictures that I want my NLM to help me in my business so I can do it directly inside of the autonomous database in a very easy, very easy way. 00:09:41:00 - 00:10:02:02 Unknown So that's why from I didn't AI different area point of view is generating fake fake data or synthetic data. I can go with vector, which is very important. I don't need to move the data inside or outside to different system, which is the converge capabilities that I mentioned before. And also I can create production ready applications in a matter of, of of minutes. 00:10:02:04 - 00:10:24:19 Unknown So we have also a great capability which is select AI in which we can use natural language to resolve business queries. And this is, compared with a competition. And we have something which is really nice or very cool. And this is because the select AI feature is inside of the Oracle database is in the heart of the Oracle database. 00:10:24:21 - 00:10:44:11 Unknown So for example, if you go and talk with ChatGPT is outside. We didn't know anything about your data. You know, tell me. Give me a recommendation about what you are what I'm looking for. But once you are inside of the Oracle database, the select AI the SLM is able to know everything about your business. 00:10:44:13 - 00:11:06:15 Unknown But on top of that. So there are two key things, that are very important. One is the integration with all the Oracle ecosystem. It's very easy to create an application. For example, I created very simple application. Yes, to show the potential, although it is a bit useless, but I use my Apple Watch and Siri to talk with my autonomous database. 00:11:06:21 - 00:11:27:23 Unknown So even though I'm, it seems like I'm talking with Siri at the end, the Apple Watch is sending a Rest API to select the AI SQL statement. So, create these kinds of things. It's our, one hour effort or less. Okay. So, this is very, very powerful. And I think it's more complicated to configure this. The Apple watch. 00:11:27:23 - 00:11:47:03 Unknown Than doing the rest API. So this is give the feeling to our customers or anybody who is using it that I can have do it, do it very quickly. And if tomorrow instead of open AI I want to use work, I can do it very easily. That's another. My application is going to work the same. 00:11:47:06 - 00:12:07:07 Unknown My rest API is going to be the same. And the second thing, which is very important is the security. Because even though you ask, tell me all the data, at the end you're going to generate a SQL statement. And if your user doesn't have the data privileges to read all the data, the L&M is not that an issue. 00:12:07:08 - 00:12:37:19 Unknown All the information is secure by by default, because I have seen customers that for example, they build their own, the let's say their own, they put everything in a black box ChatGPT and then it's working. But they have a concern. What happens if I try to get information, imagine my medical or healthcare information about another user. You are never 100% sure that you can do some hacking to get this information. 00:12:37:21 - 00:13:00:10 Unknown So at the end, what they do is they build another L&M to supervise the response. Anything after an L&M to supervise the second L&M. So everything became very, very, very complicated. But if you have the security by default it you can forget about all these things and make it applications, really to do all this kind of things, which is really powerful. 00:13:00:12 - 00:13:22:15 Unknown So that's why I think that the AI data engineer with Autonomous database has all these benefits to create value in matter of, of minutes for the, for the business. So this is super interesting for those, listening who want to get this started in this file, where can anyone for our audience go to learn about how to become an AI data engineer? 00:13:22:17 - 00:13:42:06 Unknown I think one of the key resources, because we are talking about many features about the Oracle Autonomous Database to be able to work with any kind of data type or to create the rest of the services and so on, so that we have a web page which is called Live Loves this. Live loves our Oracle, a free training. 00:13:42:06 - 00:14:08:16 Unknown So we have more than 1000 trainings there for free, in which even you can have a your own sandbox to play, to play around. Also very important that even if you want to play on your local laptop. So we have a Docker image. So the stuff working in the laptop, even if you are interested to do this kind of things no and from there there are many live loves that will be interesting, like, the basics of the autonomous database, how it works, how to create one. 00:14:08:18 - 00:14:30:08 Unknown We have live loves about Data studio. How to start with the graphical interface, how the looks splice and so on. Maybe then I will do something about, select AI, I can connect to another limb or I can create my application. How can create the fresh data services on top of that. So these are then key components that I will do it. 00:14:30:10 - 00:14:58:19 Unknown And then to become the real AI engineer task we talk the vector how to work directly inside of the Oracle database. And then something that I highly recommend is to use Apex or Application Express, which is local application development. So I can create applications without the need of code. And even we have already built applications that you can use as for example, Lap chat to the first use cases that anybody wants to use. 00:14:58:21 - 00:15:24:21 Unknown I want to chat with my data. I didn't want to use a black box or to write a strange commands and a create an application, have an easy way. So with this free live lab, you can have it in your laptop very, very easily and start working with, select AI under business. And then also we have another select the AI or support, which is a bit more advanced because the first business application is I want to chat with my data. 00:15:24:23 - 00:15:46:23 Unknown And the second customer requirement is I want to create an application for my business user. For example, I know that nobody's reading the documentation. I will improve myself there. So let me let me create an application in which anybody can ask questions about the documentation to resolve any issues to to reduce the number of tickets on and so on. 00:15:47:01 - 00:16:09:01 Unknown So this is also, done in a, in a free live love using vector. So we have the PDFs, the vector and then the L&M. And in a few clicks you can have all this, this work. So I recommend to go to this live love of application. You can look it in Google do it. You will see it because it's very, very nice, very simple, very intuitive with a lot of videos. 00:16:09:04 - 00:16:34:14 Unknown So anybody can can follow it. And we have some angle. Something which is very important is we don't assume that you have some knowledge previous and knowledge, which is very, very, very important. Well, this has been such, inspo conversation before we will run up, my final question will be if you could give one piece of advice to faculty or students, what would it be? 00:16:34:16 - 00:16:54:21 Unknown Something that I see. Well, now that everything is changing very fast. So we see a lot of products, a lot of AI, a lot of things there in the in the market are going on, which is very basic, but something that didn't change are the fundamentals a good data strategy is very important to consume any kind of AI data. 00:16:54:23 - 00:17:17:22 Unknown And this maybe the name has changed, but if you go, look for a different name is the same concept of the same architecture, the same best practices. So my recommendation will be learn about all these principles, because I don't think it's going to change is true that, for example, the cloud has more flexibility, will be more cost efficient, but the architecture is not going to it's not going to change. 00:17:17:22 - 00:17:40:12 Unknown No. So this is the the first thing. And the second thing SQL is really powerful. We see as a standard everywhere. So SQL for Json, sequel for relational SQL, for graph everywhere. So with two key things could be the main components I would recommend to anybody looking for to start to build on this kind of things and then going for this kind of live love 00:17:40:12 - 00:18:01:05 Unknown So you want to became an AI data engineer. Ofcourse I think those were a great piece of advice. So a big thank you to have here for joining me on the podcast today. Thank you very much. If you want to learn more about Oracle Academy, please check out our website and subscribe to the podcast. Thank you for listening. 00:18:01:07 - 00:18:13:10 Unknown That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

In this episode host Lorna Juma speaks with recent construction management graduates, University of Nairobi, Lewis Miringa and Joyce Ojamong about real-world applications of P6 in construction projects. Learn how Primavera P6 has shaped the careers of two recent Construction Management and explore the increasing role of tech in construction. ----------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00;00;09;02 - 00;00;36;01 Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy prepares the next generation's workforce. 00;00;36;03 - 00;01;13;20 I am your host, Lorna Juma. In this episode, I am joined by Lily Smearing and Jasper Jamal Rees, recent construction management graduates from the University of Nairobi. Join us as we hear their stories. Learn about, how Primavera P6 has shaped their careers and explore the increasing role of tech in construction project management. Whether you're a student, educator or professional in the construction field, this episode will offer valuable insights into the practical impact of P6 on construction projects and career growth. 00;01;13;22 - 00;01;40;16 Welcome Luis and Joyce. Now, to start off. Can you give me a bit about your background and the respective courses you undertook? Joyce, I'll start with you. Thank you. Lana. I'm so grateful to be here. My name is just a general environmental graduate and construction management graduate from the University of Nairobi. But until recently, where I am currently practicing as a scientist. 00;01;40;19 - 00;02;05;11 Data. So, I basically monitor on project site activities. Thank you. Luis. Thank you, Lorna. My name is Luis meeting. I am a graduate from the University of Nairobi on pursuing construction management. Currently working on Junior Challenge development at city. We also are developing a lot of seating data. Thank you so much. And Leo is just, to have that conversation. 00;02;05;14 - 00;02;31;29 How did you first hear about the Oracle Academy program and its inclusion of Primavera P6? Thank you. My first introduction when I came to learn about Oracle Academy was through creation. This is a student body in full construction real estate student association at the University of Nairobi. Faculty in the Built Environment and at the Department of Real Estate Construction Management and quantity serving. 00;02;32;01 - 00;02;59;12 So, I will part of the students conceived and then time which is the regression body. And the part of the initiative we had wanted to do is have also invited people who can be relevant when they graduate out in the industry. And how do you do this? Is, well, one of the ways is equipping these students with skills that actually in the industry. 00;02;59;16 - 00;03;30;12 So, part of what we're using construction is, Scheduling software. Scheduling software. So, we did that bridge broken. Think the country director. We need what I've been doing, which was well-received. They invite us a meeting them we this class with these. So, when we got there, it was like, let's get into what happened. We came to realize that these are being part of. 00;03;30;14 - 00;04;06;05 And there's a lot of an academy that offers these courses on products that Oracle offers. So, we got there, learned about. The curriculum they do offer and part of it was to have the university, partner with Oracle and get us to have account. So, though I will share the content. We were able to initiate this partnership. The university was already done was giving an account a member account where lecturers are able to sign up students. 00;04;06;07 - 00;04;36;06 Now students get to their own instances, but accounts for these accounts so they are able to access these curriculums. In on the afternoon. So, through this, I was able to learn more about D6, pretty much about the project management curriculum. Good. Even, attempts to download the BC software as a student version. Practically use it. New scenarios I need, which is really amazing. 00;04;36;09 - 00;05;10;09 And that was my first experience. And we the analytics and, thank you so much for that story. So just moving on to you. What motivated you to enroll and learn about this specific tool? And that is Primavera P6. Thank you, Lana. So, my first experience with P6 is from the Python version. So just talked about, with organized our actual training by P6, we were made aware that this is a tool that is widely used in the industry. 00;05;10;12 - 00;05;33;01 So, that motivated me to learn more about putting my video pieces as well as the resources that you provided, that Oracle provided. You were able to get tutorials from the student home and it able also be gained a certificate after the training sessions. And, just having the available resources for you to go through was motivation enough. 00;05;33;02 - 00;05;57;07 And I'm so grateful for that opportunity. How has gaining, Primavera P6 skills given you a competitive edge during your job search? So, during my job, such, there was an opportunity of, site coordinator in a construction site, and I was called for an interview, and they were looking for someone with a vast, project management skills, in particular. 00;05;57;07 - 00;06;23;09 Skills. Link. And since Primavera P6 is a skills link tool. I got to be. I was asked more about it. And the skills that I had and the knowledge that I was able to explain the cost aspects, there's considering aspects, the resource management aspects and that, let me get the job opportunity. And now, Lois, moving over to you. 00;06;23;11 - 00;06;54;04 Can you share specific examples where these skills helped you stand out or secure an opportunity? See what I can mentioning. And it's really nice when somebody asks you something that you are really conversant about. So, when I was actually attending the interview, I was asked, to give a scenario on how you would allocate resources to an activity and how will you know you, and I'm not, resources already located. 00;06;54;09 - 00;07;21;20 This is the kind of questions where you, you actually see deadlines and, and answer them because, but back in school. Oh, we interacted in the P6 till about scheduling. And so, and you are really, really conversant about it. So, it's, it's, it's a question that we answer in confidence. You even give a practical scenario of how you will schedule unit, which is actually what I need. 00;07;21;22 - 00;07;46;15 And I know it pretty much. And I am employed and another scenario, after working there for some, some time, we were actually sent to an did it for a crash program, which is also a concept in P6 when you are really lagging behind in the in, in, in in the scheduling in in addition, you know, the credit, you have to come up with a crash program. 00;07;46;20 - 00;08;19;10 Are you interested in activities and catch up with the lost time. So, part of what we were tasked to do is come up with a crash program. And if, we were given timelines when given due process and asked to come up with a schedule of how you are going to complete these tasks, which was handing over units, but 48 of them in in a period of three months, something you interact with it, you do it. 00;08;19;12 - 00;08;51;22 Because you understand it, which is actually what I need. And, turned out to be successful. So, it is it is something that is applicable out here. As much as you learn, it is good. So, what I'm hearing is a lot of, importance of academia, industry collaboration, which, you know, gives you access to industry tools. And once you are conversant with them, you know, you get a lot of confidence, gives you a differentiating factor, even when you're applying for jobs, even when you're undertaking the interview. 00;08;51;25 - 00;09;20;04 Great. Thank you so much. Now, Joyce, now that you started working in the construction industry, how are you applying Primavera P6 skills in your daily task? You learned so much that, you find that in large construction projects you have multiple contractors, multiple contractors with different tasks that, they have we have to schedule them in a way that we don't lose time as we go along the projects. 00;09;20;06 - 00;09;45;23 So daily, we schedule activities. Primavera P6 provides a work on structure. So, you want to group your activities into smaller tasks and then to be able to schedule them appropriately, allocating enough time for all the contractors. The other thing is you can monitor progress as you go along. So, you monitor progress against what was planned. 00;09;45;25 - 00;10;13;01 And that way you're able to manage time along that project. You manage cost, you know, when you extend your time plans, it comes in extra extrapolate. So, management of the project items is made using the Primavera P6. And Lois, moving over to you. Can you share, specific projects where you've used, P6 to manage timelines, resources or budgets? 00;10;13;06 - 00;10;52;04 Okay. And as I've mentioned before, it was vital, fresh program. Vital was a project that was apparently pain changing and we had to put some good input, some efforts to be able to catch up with time. So about, P6 it's a software that involves a long-term planning, budgeting and even risk analysis when it comes to, the planning aspect itself and the scheduling you get to, you get to when your activities, what breakdown structure you sequence activities inside that. 00;10;52;08 - 00;11;15;20 Then in these activities you want to assign resources to them. Once you assign resources, you are able to track at any given specific time. Is the project actually running behind schedule? And if it is and running behind schedule, which activities are, making it lag behind? And in terms of cost, at least you can budget at any given specific time you can do to pinpoint these projects as of budget. 00;11;15;27 - 00;11;35;03 And if this is its budget and if it's not, if it's not by budget, what is bringing the total to the cost? I was able to pinpoint and say these and these activities are the ones which are costing us. And what can we do to be able to, to, to keep that amount that has been brought about as an overall. 00;11;35;05 - 00;12;25;21 So these are some of these schemes, some of the things that a business does when it comes to the part of the risk analysis, it is something, really amazing because, for the other or many, scheduling software, the interacting with the impact of risk analysis actually fall into this things, which is really amazing in, in a case where you can be able to identify, risk even as an it's really amazing, an instance I can give these thing, we go the procurement department and we have, we have the procurement department, we have the engagement to work to anybody, the procurement department to get materials for the guys and see we have 00;12;25;23 - 00;12;49;20 some materials, some inputs that are supposed to arrive. And this month. But no procurement gets a message but realize or they get some idea that this content is not going to arrive this month due to delays expected and whatever achieved in that month. This information is very critical not to procurement, but to the guys in the field. This comes as a risk. 00;12;49;27 - 00;13;14;16 So, in P6 you're able to raise this risk because in the field this is you guys able to identify each stage. Just be able to know which does depend on this risk. And what is the impact of this risk to the overall schedule. How is it going to impact our delivery. These are some of the skills that you get to practically engage with during you interact with P6. 00;13;14;19 - 00;13;43;17 And as you can see now when you come out in the field, they are quite applicable. So, my experience we in Primavera P6, we are able to generate a procurement schedule. So, in a program. Excuse me, let's take an example of Alto for example. And so, we have two good time games for certain tasks. So, for example we need like the latest bid for active technical submittal the latest date for that submittal to be approved by consultants. 00;13;43;19 - 00;14;09;02 We have the latest date for example delivery to site and its approval. And after that now after the approval of the sample, then we do now go to manufacture. And you find that some are important. So, they have like a long-time leading period. So, the Primavera you're able to check these durations and able to serve and able to know where the risk is. 00;14;09;02 - 00;14;34;26 And so, you want to serve them at the right time. So, we are also Primavera B6. You like schedule? Adjusting time delivery for installation so that we won't have problems of storage issues on site, for example. And so, this is just more of a scheduling tool helping to solve the procurement issues on site. The other item I wanted to talk about is health and safety risks. 00;14;34;29 - 00;15;08;00 So, scheduling again, you know, able to serve any health and safety risks that, you see that the project might face. So, for example, a high-risk activity might be working on tight. So, you do want to schedule another activity and, what, work on tight activity. So, when someone is working at a scaffold at a height in the event scheduling and you us just below it because that is a ready and safe for their work. 00;15;08;09 - 00;15;33;26 So, with B6, you want to know, and you want to tell this and schedule it appropriately. And then things would be like, vehicle movement on time, you know, and teenagers where it's not safe working on a particular road, for example, at eight on the construction site. So, you could do lead to when there are no deliveries on site, for example. 00;15;34;20 - 00;16;03;02 So, it's more of a scheduling, thing that serves the risks of the project, helps you identify the risks and be able to come up with mitigation measures. The other thing I wanted to talk about is how because you can get customizable components from P6 so that to you want to present presented, in meetings. And you're able to make decisions so you can just track the project as you go along. 00;16;03;04 - 00;16;46;18 Yeah. Just quick mention about a mode that are driven decision making for even for the part of the resource. When you are allocating resources to activities, P6 is able to be somewhere you can be able to actually view this resource is actually over utilized. And you cannot assign another, another, another task. They're not assign this resource to another task at this moment, even in in in the in the concept of portfolio management, you can be running a project and say you need to accompany running three projects that I will and the assignment be shared services that a company uses to it's able to detect tell you that this resource is seems to 00;16;46;18 - 00;17;12;13 be available, but it is overly utilized in order to able to even be able to allocate resources. Space means able to know anything. You need to add more resources without issue. So, you have enough and, and also the aspect of collaboration and teamwork. When you look at, other scheduling software. It's such a feature that is widely available. 00;17;12;13 - 00;17;33;08 And then when it comes to P6 especially, you know, with the adverse mix to what happens in other cloud, you're able to work as a team if you're working on the same file but different people. Construction project is all about stakeholders. You have the design team, you know, the quality control team. You have those guys executing the tasks in the field. 00;17;33;13 - 00;18;00;16 But these people have to work on the same sort of one affects the job. So having a schedule in a centralized place where all these people get to play, but access is given depending on the level. And rather than having a file that is locally saved in the, in the, in the, in my computer where I need it, if I need some input from another person, I share it with him. 00;18;00;18 - 00;18;26;22 Then he does his own things. She has. It would be it's kind of an outdated thing now, which comes to an end to get we find out. You find like now it's kind of a beam environment. We are all working together, working on the same platform, scheduling. There, happy anything out there and information is readily available. It's something which is a practical and you, I'm using it. 00;18;26;22 - 00;18;57;03 I'm using about P6 joints. I feel like you have one additional point. Yes. How P6 helps in contact management. So, you find that, when multiple projects, they be in need of creating and integrated skills. And so, it would be important to tell all the other conductors at the, beginning of the project that the P6 selected by the integrated program created by P6 is the main point of reference. 00;18;57;10 - 00;19;26;09 So, if any contractor deviates from whatever it's in the scheduling, then they would, do they billable on that on, issues that they may have raised there. So, any notices can be tracked, notices can be tracked. And also considering the dependencies that you create using the notebooks where you actually do the activities to, be carried out at the same time or one after the other. 00;19;26;10 - 00;20;05;18 That's a very great tool with P6. So, with that being clean so you can manage big claims. Well and it helps in contact management, music and sort thinking. Thank you, Joyce Lewis. When, when we come to predicting what will happen in the future. This is something known as what if analysis. See, we are doing, a projection of we would like to bring these resources, and we would like to move in this direction, but we don't actually know what the impact of it would be to like we need to take this direction. 00;20;05;20 - 00;20;29;21 But now we want to know what the impact of will be taking this direction, something that somebody could analyze for many weeks. But when it comes to P6, because that that's what the analysis feature, we, if you have what was asked to tell you, you said they're going to complete in three months, but now he wants you to complete it in two months. 00;20;30;01 - 00;20;55;10 The big question is what you want me to do for you to complete in three months? It's a big question. Which is? Which has an answer. But now you need to analyze and know what needs to happen for you to calculate. Do they have so in P6 you can basically put us in that scenario or without creating a different file, you can be able to do this line. 00;20;55;13 - 00;21;15;05 You, schedule say and now create a create a scenario of if I add these resources, what will be the impact in the original stage, you'll be able to visualize each and even printed as I thought. So. So we know you can start. You say I need you to add meetings and this you can give me that, report generated from these for deep analysis. 00;21;15;10 - 00;21;37;21 You tell me that you can even answer like from a meeting. So, if you said I need you to add me, like, say it. If this plot and these plans to be to be added to my project, or I need these number of parcels and given to me for me to complete something, you've only done it. The what if analysis have seen these will be the impact on the project. 00;21;37;25 - 00;22;04;24 Something that is really amazing in in P6 and you're able to even create as many of this as you want. It's not limited on this. It is just so impressive. To hear how you gave a speaking, you know, and how conversant you are, with P6 and maybe I should just ask you guys when you graduated because, you, you studied, like, professionals who have been in the field for quite a while. 00;22;06;04 - 00;22;31;27 You know, is when did you graduate? Actually, I graduated the last year. September. That is 2020. Well, thank you, thank you. So that is September 2023. And, Joyce, what about you that did you graduate at the same time? Thanks to me, actually. Let me see also benefited in 2020 3rd September. We blend the experience how in the field. 00;22;31;29 - 00;22;54;12 That's really amazing. Thank you. Thank you all. And now, just moving over to the final question. If you could give one piece of advice, to faculty or even to your fellow students or, you know, I know you now graduates. So, it could be advice to faculty, students, or recent graduates, what would it be? Think you know what I'm really advice, advice. 00;22;54;12 - 00;23;22;11 My fellow students. Okay. My former students behind me who are still in school and who would really want to be in the industry, there's an analogy that goes on around people saying they are not jobs in the market. It's something which is not really true. What is really lacking the market is competent people who can actually do what the industry demands they do, and it is what will teach you the duty, but it's going to teach you. 00;23;22;14 - 00;23;54;16 So, what needs to be done? But now you need the practical bit of it. You need to understand Oracle is in the industry. They are offering so many solutions widely in it in, in in construction all over the they are offering solutions, and they are going and explain why Oracle Academy that is now willing to give resources to students, teach them about the solutions that are being offered in the construction in the aid industry. 00;23;54;18 - 00;24;16;26 So, it is an opportunity that students should take and run, and the University of Nairobi has, I mean by a country, but I don't I know there are other universities that do have it. So those listening to me or those students, well, who really wants to be in this industry, they should take it. Sign up to Oracle student. 00;24;16;26 - 00;24;43;12 Have get access to these materials. But that is how about an interaction. You know so yeah. And for those who made some not have it in their school, it is upon you as a student to take it up. As I have told you, Oracle feels like. So, it is people who are willing to say, yeah and you need to engage with you. 00;24;43;14 - 00;25;07;18 Yeah, they are even ready to give you resources free on this platform to be able to learn. So, students should really universities and faculty should really take up this opportunity to give students in these games and I think they will not be a better place even now if you as a student. Yeah, they will learn these things as teachers. 00;25;07;21 - 00;25;31;10 And so, this this student will be able to access the student tab. And that is through the institutions, just like you did through, the University of Nairobi and being available to you through your faculty members. Right? Yes. And so, as part of our final question, I would like us to touch on breaking, gender stereotypes in construction. 00;25;31;24 - 00;25;59;20 Joyce, as a woman in the construction industry, how has acquiring technical skills like chemotherapy six influenced your confidence and opportunities? In a traditionally male dominated field? And if you could give one piece of advice to aspiring, female students who would like to work in the construction industry, what would it be? Thank you. Nana. 00;25;59;22 - 00;26;26;03 So, acquiring the P6 skills has been a game changer for me. So, this create the skills as equip me with the ability to manage complex projects as I had mentioned. So, with multiple contractors, you would be scared to win the progress integral to get risks. So, it has been a game changer. And I think skills, especially being a male dominated, field. 00;26;26;06 - 00;26;59;29 So, it has helped me stand out proving that you just require the right skills and knowledge, regardless of gender. And additionally, to that, as, work as I said, coordinator, I'm also missing my second degree at the University of Nairobi, being Master of Arts in construction management. And that the university has also provided me an opportunity to assist in next hiring and, able to monitor my, the arrested identity that I'm currently working with. 00;27;00;04 - 00;27;27;07 So, I Shamli insights from the industry. I share my experience and, able to inform the students to build their confidence with the abilities that they have. They should not shy away being a male dominated field. They should, pursue more technical courses, acquire more skills on the technical bits of their industry. And there's also room for everyone in the industry. 00;27;27;07 - 00;27;54;03 So, guys should come join us in the construction industry then, which in my way, I think, improve your skills and definitely trying to thrive in the construction field. Yes. Thank. All right. Thank you both so much. Honestly, this has been, you know, we've had a very interesting discussion, on just real-world applications of P6, in the construction industry. 00;27;54;20 - 00;28;26;28 You know, to our listeners, I encourage you to visit our website, academy.oracle.com to learn more about Oracle Academy's, you know, learning resources for faculty members as well. We have teaching, resources available to you as well. So, I also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. Feel free to share this with your friends as well. And also, please follow Oracle Academy on X, Instagram and Facebook just to keep up, with all our activities, with our members. 00;28;27;00 - 00;28;35;17 Thank you so much. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.

In this episode host Tyra Peirce speaks with Scott Stroz, MySQL evangelist about how Data and AI work together. ----------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00;00;09;02 - 00;00;34;16 Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies, and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generation's workforce. 00;00;34;18 - 00;01;01;19 I'm your host, Tyra Peirce. In this episode, I speak with Oracle, my SQL developer advocate Scott Stroz, about how AI uses data, and the database skills students need to have as they work with AI. So, Scott, you're a returning guest for me. Can you give me a little bit about your background and role at Oracle? For those who may not have listened to our previous podcasts. 00;01;01;22 - 00;01;24;27 Sure. So, first and foremost, I consider myself a full stack developer and I've been a full stack developer for longer than the term full stack developer has actually been in existence. And in that time, the only technology in my stack that has remained constant is MySQL. I used it on my first job as a web developer, and I still use it today, and I've used it pretty much every day in between. 00;01;25;00 - 00;01;47;09 A lot of people, even people in the tech industry, they frequently ask, what does it mean that you're a developer advocate? And there's a lot of people I'm friends with and, I've met in developer relations, where we each kind of have like our own elevator pitch, like a quick, you know, 1 or 2 sit ins answer to basically get people to understand what it is that we do. 00;01;47;11 - 00;02;10;12 And the one that I've come up with is my job is to help developers be better at their jobs and I accomplish, or I hope I accomplish this in, different ways by producing content for developers through blog posts or, videos or podcasts such as this. I also, speak at conferences and I do a guest lectures for colleges and schools. 00;02;10;15 - 00;02;29;26 You are such a wonderful resource. And I we work together quite a bit, and I, I think it's good because I think that a lot of times developers don't understand what they're getting into or the different ways that they can develop and change codes. And I love that. I've got an expert that we can call on, and especially about this new topic. 00;02;29;28 - 00;03;00;18 So, kind of segue into that new topic. How does a I use data to learn SQL? It's a kind of a complicated answer, but it's also probably simpler than some people might think. With the recent release of Heat Wave, which is an AI solution in, Heat Wave that's available on Oracle Cloud, I've started playing around a little bit more than I had been, but it hasn't been with like the front end where I asked, I can I chat by questions, and it would give me answers. 00;03;00;21 - 00;03;22;07 It's been more feeding data into an AI engine, which in this case was heat wave Gen I. And while I was tinkering, I came to the realization that AI is not some black magic that just can pull answers out of thin air when you ask the question. It's just all based on math, and it's not even a new kind of math. 00;03;22;07 - 00;03;41;28 The math has actually been around for a long time, and I gotta say, I was a little a little disappointed. I was kind of hoping for some black magic, but for a genuine AI solution to be able to find pertinent data. So, if you ask a question, I put a chat bot the way it needs to find the answers. 00;03;41;28 - 00;04;14;16 And the first thing we need to do is we need to make sure that we get what are called embeddings of the source data. And this is basically what we use to feed in AI. And if we want it to say get embeddings for a collection of PDFs in any solution, we can actually use heat wave AI to run a stored procedure that will fetch the documents out of a bucket, a storage bucket in Oracle Cloud, and then it breaks down each document into a series of tokens. 00;04;14;18 - 00;04;43;24 Now, in the AI world, a token is a small series of a small set of characters. It can be a single word. It can be multiple words, or sometimes it can actually just be a small part of a longer word. And then using some mathematical algorithms, these tokens are converted into what we call a vector. And a vector is nothing more than an array of hexadecimal data, hexadecimal values that represent that token. 00;04;43;27 - 00;05;11;01 And this is our embedding. And those are stored typically in a database. There are other systems. This isn't just unique. The heat wave Gemini, other Gemini systems have a very similar process for ingesting the source data. And one of the most popular uses of AI solutions is what's called a retrieval augmented generation, or RAC, or what we would know as like an AI chat bot. 00;05;11;07 - 00;05;33;29 So, you open up a chat window when you start asking questions, and the AI spits back answers based off of the source data, and it's using the way it gets the answers to the questions is it actually takes the question. And using those same algorithms that you used with the source data, it actually gets embeddings for the question itself. 00;05;34;01 - 00;06;04;13 And then using some built in database functions. And in the case of heatwave and AI uses, a function that determines how far the tokens in the question are from the tokens in the source data. And again, that's some mathematical algorithm that I haven't even begun to try and understand. And with heat wave genAI, when you ask the questions, there's actually another stored procedure you can run to actually run like a chat bot. 00;06;04;25 - 00;06;41;06 And it will take the embeddings that matched in the source data and send that to the large language model that resides in the database. Or Liam is what people more commonly known as that. And it takes those that information those embeddings that matched and it generates a more human sounding response to the question. I've noticed when I've gone through and I've asked, and I a question like you can still tell it's a computer when they respond, but they are getting better and better and better, and the information coming back is excellent. 00;06;41;09 - 00;07;15;05 And it is really, really good information. They still don't have the human and the human inflection, the human tone. And you can tell when you're right, but it's getting really good. And so, then on to my next question. How can I use data to improve performance? So, because the entire process, which you know, from ingesting the data to actually retrieving relevant data from the embeddings, is based on math, the results can actually be incredibly accurate. 00;07;15;05 - 00;07;37;29 Like you just said, it's it gets better and better almost every day, and AI systems can process large amounts of data and make that the data and available. That tends to be more accurate than if you did like a database, like search, in a SQL query, or even a full text search in a database, or even better than what you get in some search engines. 00;07;38;02 - 00;08;13;02 Why does the quality of data impact the results AI provides? Well, it's funny that even in a new technology like AI in old adage is still true. And that is garbage in, garbage out. And all this really means is if you input bad or inaccurate data, your results are not going to be accurate. When you feed data into an AI system, you need to make sure that it's high quality and it's accurate because if it's not, then any results you get are not going to be high quality and they're not going to be accurate. 00;08;13;04 - 00;08;34;24 What are some of the skills that database professionals should have when they work with AI? Something a lot of people may not be aware of is that every AI solution, whether it's a chat bot or something else, it uses some kind of storage, usually a database, on the back end to store the embeddings for the data. 00;08;34;27 - 00;09;04;09 And while there's nothing particularly special or different about how we store vector data compared to other data types such as strings or dates, it's something that database professionals need to keep in mind when ingesting that data. Can I back up here? Let's go back to the. While there's nothing particularly different or special about how this data is stored compared to other data such as strings and dates, there is one thing database professionals need to keep in mind when ingesting this data. 00;09;04;12 - 00;09;31;18 Embeddings can take up a lot of space. So, for example, I was working on a demo for Heat Wave AI, and I used a PDF that was just a few megabytes in size, and it generated over 55,000 rows of embeddings. Now, the process of creating and retrieving embeddings can also be resource intensive. 00;09;31;21 - 00;09;53;02 So, there might not be special skills needed to store and retrieve the embeddings in the AI data. But we need to make sure that the system has enough resources so that the CPU and Ram is adequate, as well as having storage space. So those are probably the three things that database administrators or people who work in databases need to concentrate on. 00;09;53;02 - 00;10;11;29 More than anything else when working with the AI system. So, Scott, one final question then if you could give one piece of advice to faculty, your students, what would it be? All right, so I'm going to cheat here. I'm going to give two pieces of advice. So, the first piece of advice will be to learn as much as you can about AI. 00;10;12;01 - 00;10;32;22 AI is everywhere, probably even in places it doesn't belong. And while I think the fad is going to die down, I also think AI is here to stay. There won't be a single area in the IT field that won't be influenced by AI in some way. So, the more you know about different AI solutions, the more value you valuable you're going to be. 00;10;32;22 - 00;11;01;07 Not just your current employer, but to future employers as well. My second, this second piece of advice would be not to fear AI. I talked to a lot of developers, and I often get questions at conferences from younger developers concerned that AI is going to take their jobs and while AI tools, especially those that are designed to help write code, are impressive, they are far from perfect. 00;11;01;09 - 00;11;22;20 I have a personal project that I work on, and I use AI tools when I'm coding to try to cut down on some of the boilerplate code that I that I might need to write, and I'll ask for snippets of code given a specific language and tasks I need to achieve. And I have never gotten a response where I could just plug the code in, and it worked. 00;11;22;22 - 00;11;43;18 It's never happened. I'd say probably the best I got was about 90%. I'd say probably in the area of about 85% would be the average. So even though the AI chat bot is helping me write the code, I still have to know how the what the code is supposed to do. I always I've always needed to tweak it and so that's a nice adjunct. 00;11;43;19 - 00;12;11;22 It saves me time from, you know, not having to write everything, but you still need somebody to look at the code to see be like, oh, this, this is wrong. That's, you know, I told what I wanted in the note, but it's for some reason it's giving me in Java notation is, is one thing that actually happened when and again, I hear people, you know, they, you know, when I talk to people and they say they're concerned about, I think I'm afraid I'm going to lose my job. 00;12;11;22 - 00;12;41;11 I, I tell them something that I heard at a keynote talk about AI, and it's, it's about two years ago. And the interesting topic of the keynote was, is AI going to take your job? And the answer to that question, which the presenter gave on the last slide, was, no, as a developer, AI is not going to take your job, but a person using AI will. 00;12;41;13 - 00;13;00;08 I think that's very poignant advice that. And so, it's almost like you've got to be a developer. You've got to understand so you know how to use it so you can maintain your job. I think that's a really good piece of advice to all those faculty and students out there that are really wondering what the impact of AI is going to be. 00;13;00;21 - 00;13;22;25 A big thank you to Scott for speaking with me today about data and AI. It was really insightful. Please visit academy.oracle.com to learn more about Oracle Academy and the resources we offer to faculty and students and subscribe to our podcast. Thanks for listening. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.