Gobán Saor

My name is Tom Gleeson, I’m the Gobán Saor (pronounced Gobawn Sayer) a master datasmith. Living in Eadestown, in rural Co. Kildare, Ireland with my wife Caimín, two kids, a Jack Russel terrier and a cat.

My IT passion is data, particularly in its raw, untamed and often unloved state that many businesses are forced to use day-in day-out i.e. the un-conformed, un-cleansed, un-safe extracts from operational systems. If there’s any value to be extracted from such data then I’ll find it.

I also love data when it’s on the move, I’ve been building data interfaces for 3 decades, but the thrill of extending systems by getting them to talk to other systems still remains.

Although most of my data work is now within the realms of BI and general data crunching, the sight of an OLTP database schema still stirs the blood. Looking at nothing more than a system’s database you can tell everything the system was and everything the system is going to be (apologies to outhouse assassination scene in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven where William Munny, tells the shaken kid wanting to be his protege “it’s a hell of a thing to kill a man. You take away everything he has and everything he would have.” ).

Data is the DNA of any business, systems come and go, data lives on forever.

Master Datasmith? Well, I could style myself a data analyst/systems integrator/reporting analyst/DBA/business analyst but I’d end up all /’d out. I hope the term datasmith conveys the craft nature of my work with data, for it is a craft that I’m particularly good at (hence the master adjective) and also take great pride in.

My background in IT goes back over 30 years, starting as a trainee programmer with one of the UK’s earliest software houses, Altergo.  After 4 years with Altergo (the only ”proper job’ I’ve ever had!) I spent the next decade or so freelancing as an OLTP developer, first VAX/VMS based, then Oracle solutions, working for companies such as PA Consulting, Digital (DEC), IDA Ireland, Woodchester Finance, & Guinness (now Diageo).  In the early 90s I co-founded Keyhouse Computing, now the largest supplier of legal software in Ireland, while continuing to act as a consultant for Guinness Ireland (Diageo).

It was during my latter years working in Diageo that I fine-tuned my datasmithing skills, working on a series of CRM (Siebel), ERP (SAP) and datawarehousing projects.  It was also there that I discovered the power of Excel and its effective use by civilians working in “the shadow IT” world.

Now, as a virtual data analyst, I no longer have access to a lot of the expensive enterprise software I once depended on, instead I have rolled-my-own datasmithing tool, xLite, stitching together Excel and SQlite with a bit of C, some Python and a lot of VBA.

For a large percentage of tasks that is all I need.

But, if the situation warrants, I can use Palo BI suite where once I would have used Essbase, I can also call on my own pay-as-I-need-them powerful Linux & Win 2K3 servers and Hadoop clutsers (Amazon’s EC2 service), my own secure data storage and transport service (Amazon’s S3), various free and open source tools such as Mondrian (an MDX speaking, ROLAP-with-a-cache tool), Wabit BI Reporting, and two ETL tools Talend & Kettle (Pentaho PDI).

Gobán Saor?  The (or more correctly An) Gobán Saor was a stone mason (or sometimes a black smith) who according to Irish mythology by virtue of his craft (building castles, moving mountains, that sort of thing) was able to live a free life moving from commission to commission and from royal court to royal court. My father who came from a long line of stone masons and master builders, told me many of these stories and also used to take me to a magical island in our local bogland that he called the Gobán Saor’s island. (Now better known as the discovery place of the Derrynaflan Chalice ). Continuing in the tradition of freelance craftsman (data mason rather than stone mason) I’ve used gobansaor as my nom de plume in forums, online apps etc. over the years, partially to keep a tradition alive but to be honest usually because I’m sure nobody else will have taken the name already

Contact details.