Bio: Sarah Craynon Zumbrum is an Oracle ACE Alumni (Director) and an 11x Oracle Certified Professional. She is currently a Senior Manager for Cloud Engineering at Oracle.
She has previously worked in-house as a business intelligence architect and as an EPM consultant, specializing in the Hyperion suite of tools. She has spoken at numerous Oracle user groups and gives monthly webinars on various BI and analytics topics. As a previous member of ODTUG’s Board of Directors and Hyperion SIG Board of Directors, she took her graduation from the inaugural ODTUG Leadership Program to heart and loves to help Oracle user groups. She has served as a user group conference content reviewer for many years and enjoys the process.
As an avid triathlete, Ironman finisher (x2), marathoner, and general endurance athlete, she resides with her road cycling husband near Raleigh, NC where the cycling and running choices are always good and hilly.
Disclaimer: She is not an official spokesperson for her employer, Oracle Corporation, nor does she speak on behalf of Oracle.
RealTriGeek 
When you identfied as an introvert in the leadership webinar today, I wondered if you had read Susan Cain’s “Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World that Won’t Stop Talking.” I found it after viewing her TED talk. It really rings true and led to a number of aha moments.
So, tonight I downloaded enough Oracle BI software to sink an Ark – that’s a really, really big ship. The amount of time and effort Oracle has devoted to BI and Visualizations is incredible. I anticipate a steep learning curve as I delve into Essbase, OBIEE, Data Viz for Desktop and the myriad other solutions Oracle has developed. In the end, though, it’ll be a very worthwhile journey, I’m sure. Not so much, however, for those who planned on seeing me at social events in the near future.
Many thanks to you, Sarah, for putting together this blog. Beyond being a great resource, it’s fun and a testament to (wo) man’s quest to realize their potential – athletic, intellectual or otherwise.
You’ve created a terrific primer, guide and reference library that I anticipate will provide guidance, from soup to nuts – as I head up what will be a steep learning curve. Tangentially, that’s an old, trite and broad-brush saying that never sat well with me. Several years ago, when I came across ‘four stages of incompetence’ literature, I understood why. I don’t want to lead your readers to my conclusion – below is a link to a great introductory resource. I invite everyone to make up their own mind. It’s at once a marvelous and humbling model 😉 https://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=20108§ion=3.2
Admittedly, I just took a self-serving diversion to raise awareness to one of my own interests. Now, back to the focus of my essay ;-).
Kudos to you, Sarah. I’m glad you follow up when your posts infer another related piece will follow. It’s not lost on me that you label your first post in a series as Part 0. Those looking for a Part 2 suffix in the title of a second blog in a series are out of luck. Your implementation of the traditional IT numbering system is a nod to those of us who earned our geeky stripes way back when bits and bytes were cool. In contrast, ‘hexadecimal’ is more likely to be used today to describe the result of dividing the number of spells a witch can cast by a rational number 😉 And they say techies have no sense of humor – hah!
In closing, your endurance drives both excellence in sport and a comprehensive approach to expanding our knowledge of some pretty dense and complicated topics. Well done!
My reference to your athlete endeavors accounts for the first part of your ‘Tri Geek’ moniker. The latter? A deserved complement.
This is as good a time as any to wrap up – lots of reading to do 😉 Thanks, and keep up the good work, Sarah!