Secure Email Project

Secure E-mail was a fun project and has given me a fun new tool for e-mail. I plan on continuing to use the Thunderbird e-mail. The only real issue I encountered the forwarding issue. I had my UF email forwarded to my home e-mail as that is the one a I check several times a day. When Dr. Means replied to my encrypted e-mail it was automatically forwarded to my home account so I had to turn off forwarding and have her resend the e-mail. Bow that I have thunderbird installed, I will probably not turn forwarding back on as it is quite easy for me to see my UF mail.

INBOX





Data Security


Data Security is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I did a presentation for SEEMUG ( Southeast Erwin Modelers Users Group) a few years back where to topic was data as an asset to be protected and the case study I used was TJX (TJ Max and their subsidiaries) This link http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2007/012207-bradner.html is an good primer article about the event. The author, Scott Bradner, of Network World gives a cursory explanation of the PCI (Payment Card Industry) security standards. The main point in the article is that there were 3 parties that share responsibility for a breach that is believed to have compromised over 40 million credit card numbers at an estimated cost of 7.2 billion dollars in damages. The author believes that the thieves of commission were the actual people that breached TJX’s non-compliant network and stole the numbers. But, he believe that there is also equal blame for the extremely lax network and data security employed by TJX and the lax enforcement by Fifth Third Bank, TJX’s acquiring bank. The acquiring back is the back that secures the funds for TJX from the credit card transaction and is the entity, according to the PCI standard, that is responsible for insuring compliance. Since the breach in 2006, most large companies have taken many extra precautions to insure that all PCI specification are met. At the company I work for, twice a year, I review all data warehouse databases to insure that there is no sensitive data stored in any of the reporting databases.

Database Project

Database design is my life’s work. I have been designing Relation and Dimensional models for over 20 years. My primary DMBS are DB2 and SQL Server (Relational Transactional Databases) and Oracle (Dimensional Analytics Databases). While I have worked in Access as a means for analyzing data from flat files that were over 64,000 rows and that I did not want to seat in my Oracle Databases, I have never worked with the forms or reporting aspects of Access. It was fun to see that you could create a small application without programming skills, and the reporting features may prove valuable for data research and validation that needs to go to my business users

There are a few things I would do to enhance this database. I would pull the address information out of the members table and create a members address table. This would allow the business to store more then one address for a member (home, office, or for students school address and permanent address) I would create a members phone number table. This would allow us to track multiple telephone numbers for a member (Home, Cell, Work, etc.). I would have a reference table for address type and I would encrypt the Birthdate Column I would create a State table that stores the industry standard state abbreviations and would make this column a pull down list to insure data integrity. Without business requirements, that is about as much as I would be willing to suggest.

Excel Project

The Excel Project for Spring ISM3004 was an eye-opening, “ah-ha” moment for this “old dog”. The project and the lectures discussed a number of excel functions from basic to moderately advanced. I have been working with excel since the early 1990’s and yet, right after watching the lecture about the “Find” function, I became better at my job as a data professional.

I spend many hours of my professional life exporting very large quantities of data from Oracle Databases and evaluating it for user reported problems or data profiling. My tool of choice for this has always been Excel. Up until this class, I had used very basic techniques that got the job done but were very labor intensive. This week, I was evaluating database catalogs to determine if a particular piece of data was stored in any of about 50 database schemas. We use fairy consistent naming standards for our columns in most of our IT controlled Schemas, so I was able to use the “= Find” function to locate a particular naming standard “_nbr” and translate it to a constant that was easier to sort and evaluate. Needless to say, this reduced the number of columns that needed to be evaluated by about 90%. That one new technique saved me untold hours of tedium.

It seem that every lecture so far in this class has had a very positive impact on my professional life. I suspect that is because, once you have a method to get a job done, you rarely have the time or the inclination to look for a better way. It is the classic, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” axiom. I have a whole new mind set about that now. Thomas Edison used to walk up to his employees and say “There is a better way --- Find it” I plan on looking for that better way in all of the tools I use on a daily basis thanks to this lesson.

I have used pivot tables in a past career for writing reports. Presently, I perform those function with tools like Business Objects or Hyperion (Brio) as they can subscribe to the data without export (Oracle, DB2, SQLServer) but I think I may find some new uses for pivot tables in my daily work.