My name is Tom Gleeson, I’m the Gobán Saor (pronounced Gobawn Sayer) a country datasmith. Living in Eadestown, in rural Co. Kildare, Ireland with my wife Caimín, two kids, a rabbit and a cat.
Who or what is a Gobán Saor or indeed a datasmith?
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 28 years, but the thrill of extending systems by getting them to talk to other systems still remains. Indeed, the emergence of Web 2.0 type mash-up technologies opens up even more possibilities.
Although most of my data work is now within the realms of dimensional schema and XML/JSON data messaging, 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.
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 and take great pride in.
Like any good craftsman I also take pride in my tools, and in the last few years the SaaS and open source revolutions have greatly expanded the range and the quality of such tools. I now have access to my own pay-as-I-need-them powerful servers (Amazon’s EC2 service), my own mass storage (Amazon’s S3), a free ROLAP technology (Pentaho’s Mondrian), a free MOLAP (Jedox’s PALO), a free ETL tool (Pentaho’s Kettle), a micro-ETL environment using Ruby+SQLite, multiple free enterprice-ready databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, and even OracleXE). Not forgetting the hammer and saw of the data world, Microsoft’s Excel; although most definitely not open source, its ubiquity and the wealth of solutions (both VBA and pure-formula) available on the net makes it feel so. But even the mighty Excel is feeling the wind-of-change with the appearance of on-line API accessible spreadsheets (EditGrid, Zoho and Google Spreadsheets).
Gobán Saor? The (or more correctly An) Gobán Saor was a stone mason (or a black smith according to some) 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 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 (e.g. del.icio.us/gobansaor) etc. over the years, partially to keep a tradition alive but usually because I’m sure nobody else will have taken the name already.
