The team, lecturers and the high-flyers of OracleOver a hundred teams took part in the prestigious Oracle Academy Global Data Modelling Competition 2008, and Temasek Polytechnic's very own made it onto the top honours list!
The team consisting of Teh Xue Fen Shellen, from the Diploma in Internet & Multimedia Development, Koh Jun Kiat and myself, both seniors of our very own Dip FBI, clinched a 6th place finish in the competition. This earned us bragging rights as the only Asian and Singaporean team in the top honours list of 11 teams.
However, the road to this achievement was fraught with much difficulty. The Oracle Academy Global Data Modelling Competition requires participating teams to create a database ERD diagram based on a given topic, for a fictionalised company or organisation of the team’s choosing. For this edition of the competition, the theme was meteorological weather systems, definitely not the ideal topic for amateurs in the field. At this point, it was late November, some 6 weeks to D-Day.
Without any knowledge of such systems, we turned to the National Enviroment Agency (NEA) Meteorological Services to find out more. Despite having busy schedules of their own, they were still willing to take time out to help us through with our data gathering efforts. And this even though we were pretty much clueless on what we needed to find out! For their invaluable help, kudos go out to Mr. Lesley Choo and his colleagues at NEA Meteorological Services.
Information in hand, we moved on to translating it into our ERD "masterpiece". Countless hours were spent drawing up and re-drawing our diagrams. Without a doubt, this was the toughest part. In the space of three weeks, we went through many major revamps, and each revamp had to be done in an even shorter span of time than the last. All this on top of a full-load of school and CCA commitments!
But things started falling into place. Slowly but surely, we began to put together a coherent and solid diagram, one that withstood the rigourous questions from not just ourselves, but the lecturers as well. Along with the diagram, we submitted a set of Microsoft PowerPoint slides which detailed the ERD diagram. Finally, on the morning of D-Day, we were done.
After a four month wait, the results were finally released in May, to our great surprise and joy. Our hard work had paid off! But at this point, I must pause to give special thanks to our dear lecturers, Ms How Woan Ling and Ms Cheng Huey Chen. Without their strong support and help, we would not have achieved what we did. To the lecturers we owe a BIG THANK YOU!
By Benny Chng
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