SchemaSpy to visualise the DB schema design

Are you looking for very simple and lightweight tool that generates ER diagram from commonly used DBs. SchemaSpy tool will help you to understand all the relationships in DB schema. This week blog is about SchemaSpy tool.

About SchemaSpy:

SchemaSpy is a Java-based tool (requires Java 5 or higher) that analyzes the metadata of a schema in a database and generates a visual representation of it in a browser-displayable format. It lets you click through the hierarchy of database tables via child and parent table relationships as represented by both HTML links and entity-relationship diagrams. It's also designed to help resolve the obtuse errors that a database sometimes gives related to failures due to constraints. It’s free.

SchemaSpy uses JDBC's database metadata extraction services to gather the majority of its information, but has to make vendor-specific SQL queries to gather some information such as the SQL associated with a view and the details of check constraints. The differences between vendors have been isolated to configuration files and are extremely limited. Almost all of the vendor-specific SQL is optional.

Browse some sample pages generated by SchemaSpy. Note that this was run against an extremely limited schema so it doesn't show the full power of the tool.

SchemaSpy is a command line tool. If you are interested to work with GUI based tools. Try Its GUI tools using http://www.joachim-uhl.de/projekte/schemaspygui/

Running SchemaSpy

You run SchemaSpy from the command line:

java -jar schemaSpy.jar -t dbType -db dbName [-s schema] -u user [-p password] -o outputDir

More details to explore SchemaSpy can be found below:

http://schemaspy.sourceforge.net/

Happy Learning,

Nanjundan Chinnasamy

Apache PDFBox - A Java PDF Library

I wanted to share my recent learning on PDF creation using PDFBox Java API. More technical details about this documented below.

The Apache PDFBox library is an open source Java tool for working with PDF documents. This project allows creation of new PDF documents, manipulation of existing documents and the ability to extract content from documents.

Features:

Create PDFs:

 Create a PDF from scratch, with embedded fonts and images.

Signing Digitally:

 Sign PDF files.

Print:

 Print a PDF file using the standard Java printing API.

Preflight:

 Validate PDF files against the PDF/A-1b standard.

Fill Forms:

 Extract data from PDF forms or fill a PDF form.

Split & Merge:

 Split a single PDF into many files or merge multiple PDF files.

Extract Text:

 Extract Unicode text from PDF files. Save as Image Save PDFs as image files, such as PNG or JPEG.

Other alternative frameworks/tools to generate PDF in java:

• iText: nowadays iText is a commercial library, the latest version is not for free anymore.

• FOP: I worked a lot with FOP. It's fairly resource intensive (Java > XML > XSLT > PDF) and complex PDFs become a nightmare ( may result in XSLTs with 20k+ LoC).

• PDFBox: it seems to be the best alternative although I did not work with it in large project.

More details about this can be found from my previous blog at http://nanjundanonlinedictionary.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/wanted-to-generate-pdf-and-ms-excel.html

FOP is much performance optimized solution to create a PDF. It also comes with few limitations like digital signing, split&merge etc. iText and PDFBox offers almost same features from its library. Please be aware that iText is much performance optimized solution compare to PDFBox as the parsing techniques used.

Happy Learning,

Nanjundan Chinnasamy

Is the Competency differentiates Hard&Smart Workers?

Simple answer is YES as you all know. But here i want to explain with an example.

I have read through this stories long time back. I think this holds good even today. I though i can share with my readers so that so can understand Indian Managers expectations and work accordingly. In general, to win in a competitive would, only knowledge makes the difference to identify the experienced ones.

Story:

A giant ship engine failed. The ship's owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine. 

Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a young. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom. 

Two of the ship's owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed! 
A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars. 
"What?!" the owners exclaimed. "He hardly did anything!" 
So they wrote the old man a note saying, "Please send us an itemized bill." 

The man sent a bill that read: 

Tapping with a hammer...... $2.00
Knowing where to tap.......... $9,998.00

Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort makes all the difference!

I have posted few people management related blogs recently as it is much required to understand and work as a team to win people heart. I am planning to concentrate few core technical blogs in coming days as many personally requested me!

Happy reading.

Nanjundan Chinnasamy

Technology driven business - An Example

Can the technology change the way we live today and transform our lifestyle? Yes, most of you might agree with my point as we are connected with the technology. This is once again proved by the new business model “Ola air”. This is something which I have come across this recently. Thought of sharing with you all.

Ola air - Ola chopper taxi service (https://www.olacabs.com/ola-air) brings the new technology and business in India. I am wondering how the digital technology can transform our live style and create the new business opportunity.

Banks have some specific examples like Mobile app, Apple Pay (TouchId) which changed the way the customer banking. If we change our strategy from Customer centric organization to Customer+Technology centric organization, reaching our goal might be much simpler. What do you think?


I am happy to get your experience/feedback/suggestion on Technology driven business to add more in this context. 

Ola air - Ola Chopper taxi service promo Youtube video..

Thanks,
Nanjundan Chinnasamy

Whatsapp marketing - New way of Higher value of Customer engagement

This is a follow-up blog on my previous Whatsapp Blog (http://nanjundanonlinedictionary.blogspot.in/2015/09/use-whatsapp-to-resolve-customer-queries.html). This blog is about higher degree of Customer engagement using Whatapp and how it can be achieved. 


What & Why?

•          Customers want to interact with brands today. They want to have a continuous connection and products & offers specific to them.

•          Current digital world is perfect opportunity to grow our customer base.

Leveraging interactive ads:

•          Video is very good marketing. This occupies more than 50% mobile data (http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/242393). We can reach them personally and get their meaningful feedback.

•          Native ads, Native format, Geo ads, Location based ads, Behavioral marketing.

How to make Whatsapp marketing?

•          Go with Broadcast message option– broadcast message has Limitation (only 250).

•          There are some areas like BBC (http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/79714-WhatsApp-to-Change-Social-Media-Marketing) already engaged with Whatsapp and come-up with the alternatives to send message without any limitation.

•          Firstly, we don't have any API to customize.

•          secondly, this can't be used for commercial purpose. Like BBC, your Organization has to agree with Whatsapp Inc. 

Thanks,

Nanjundan Chinnasamy

Use “Whatsapp” to resolve customer queries

This blog is all about improving “Customer Service” further from the where we are now. It's an Ideation Blog. 

Like banks across the world, Organizations might have a presence on social media platforms, allowing customers to contact them through Facebook and Twitter to respond to questions, queries and providing support.  But, Is this enough? Simple answer is NO from Customer expectation perspective and my perspective as well.

Smartphone access continues to increase; WhatsApp is now the most popular messaging app across the Globe.  According to Mobile Marketing Magazine, it is installed on half of the Smart phones in the UK (76% in INDIA).  Despite its huge popularity, we haven’t utilized the technology to communicate with our customers.

Since we are already responding to customer queries via telephone calls, emails and website live chats and other social media channels, is it worth considering using other platforms in the same way? This may be the right time to Consider such Change.

Customer Benefits are:

1. Easily accessible platform, already installed on many mobile devices worldwide.
2. As messages are free to send, there’s no cost to your customers when they contact you.
3. Easy to use, and allows messages to be sent at any time – day or night

Whatapp may be one of the greatest ways to connect with the customer. Here in India, Police provided a Whatsapp no to report a compliant. Do you think this will be a right way to leverage the Technology and help our customer? I think so.

We do have few potential drawbacks from a business perspective:

• Security – there’s ongoing concerns about how secure WhatsApp messages really are, so it might not be a brilliant idea to ask for any sensitive information.
• No Public API is available at this moment to integrate with any of our Systems. Hope, Whatsapp may publish their APIs in near future. 

We may have good option to use WhatsApp in novel ways to connect with our Customers improve their queries&issues. (More over if any critical issues, those will not be publically visible to media unlike Social media).

Your comments please...

Project Management - Business outcome-based pricing models

As a Successful Project Manager, we are constantly looking for Process improvement to reduce the Cost and Quality product on time. Despite of religiously following an existing pricing models like Time&Labor & Fixed Bid, we end-up with disappointments many times. This blog is an Ideation blog to share my thought process on Project Operating Model.   

I have gone through an article about “Business out-come based pricing model” last week. It was very interesting read and I felt that it is much needed for us at this point of time due to many factors including quality of deliverables received from suppliers from outsourcing.

We might have seen many emails stating that there was an issue with System A/B/C, please apologize to all customers for any inconvenience caused etc. I strongly believe the outcome-based pricing model will be a promising solution to prevent such issues if we considered as the supplier will be paid only based on the outcome.

Deriving the out-come SUCCESS criteria for any project will be complicated and which may leads mistrust. If we formalize the SUCCESS criteria for a project prior to outsourcing, outcome-based pricing model will be a real game changer i believe. 

Read business outcome-based pricing model first post link at http://www.firstpost.com/business/igate-aims-to-shake-up-it-billing-model-with-outcome-based-pricing-635462.html

Please post your opinions/suggestion in the comments section below to understand your views..


Thanks,
Nanjundan Chinnasamy