Kellyn Gorman
Technical Swiss Army Knife, Advocate and Engineer at Redgate
Portland, Oregon, United States
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Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman is a Database and AI Advocate and Engineer with Redgate, with a long history in multi-platform technology. An Oracle ACE Director alumnus, she has been awarded over the years for her technical contributions and community volunteerism through many organizations, including a recognition as Woman in Tech of the Year for the state of Colorado. She is one of only six women part of the Oak Table, a network for the Oracle scientist. She has extensive experience in environment optimization, cloud migration, automation and architect of robust environments. Specializing in multi-terabyte management of OLAP/DSS systems. A consistent advocate for logical tuning of code and design before hardware solutions. She's recently become known for her expertise in DevOps, AWR, (Automatic Workload Repository) and virtualization of database environments with complex cloud management in Azure and Google Cloud. She's recently been contracted with a number of AI projects, using both relational data and AI services in both data security and architecture. The technical knowledge required to support these features offers great educational opportunities to learn by attending her technical presentations, engaging with her on social media presence as DBAKevlar or reading her blog, dbakevlar.com.
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Aren’t we all tired of AI?
AI is everywhere in today’s world. It’s embedded into tools, workflows, and platforms and yet according to MIT, 95% of generative AI pilots are failing (https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/) How often is AI genuinely solving problems, or is it just the latest layer of complexity wrapped in hype?
In this technical session, Grant Fritchey, and Kellyn Gorman take a practical, no-nonsense look at AI as what it really is to the technologist today: another tool in the engineering toolbox.
Drawing from real-world experience, they explore how AI can be used to improve productivity, reduce cognitive load, and streamline everyday tasks without replacing the people who really understand the systems.
This session focuses on efficient, responsible use of AI in the modern workplace, highlighting where AI adds measurable value and where it doesn’t. You’ll learn how to think critically about AI features, how to avoid over-automation, and how to use AI to amplify expertise rather than dilute it. Grant and Kellyn will also address common fears around job displacement and explain why AI succeeds best in the real world when paired with human judgment, context, and accountability.
This session is designed for engineers, DBAs, and technical leaders who want clarity vs. hype on how AI fits into real environments today.
Navigating SQL Server to PostgreSQL Migrations and How DBAs Keep Their Sanity
Migrating from SQL Server to PostgreSQL is not just a platform change; it is an operating model shift for DBAs. While PostgreSQL offers flexibility, performance, and cost advantages, it requires rethinking how you design schema, tune queries, manage availability, and monitor production workloads. Assumptions that work in SQL Server break in Postgres in subtle and sometimes painful ways.
This session focuses on real-world migration strategies for SQL Server DBAs moving into PostgreSQL. Kellyn will cover what translates cleanly, what does not, and where teams get into trouble. This includes data type mismatches, identity columns, indexing strategies, query planner behavior, transaction semantics, locking differences, and procedural code rewrites. You will learn how to migrate safely using phased approaches, validation techniques, and performance baselining that reduce risk and downtime.
Tooling matters, especially when you will be expected to handle both platforms during the transition. We will review proven tools for schema conversion, data movement, testing, and cutover, as well as cross-platform monitoring approaches that allow DBAs to maintain visibility throughout the migration lifecycle. Topics include migration automation, workload replay, performance comparison, index analysis, and operational observability for mixed SQL Server and PostgreSQL environments.
Whether you are planning your first migration or are already deep into one, this session gives you a practical playbook for reducing risk, maintaining control, and arriving in PostgreSQL with a stable, supportable system and your reputation intact.
PostgreSQL Performance Unlocked: Building, Monitoring, and Tuning for Real-World Workloads
PostgreSQL has earned its reputation as a powerful, flexible, and open-source relational database system, but getting great performance out of it requires more than just a default installation. This session dives into the essentials of building a performant PostgreSQL database, covering recommended practices that apply across transactional, analytical, and hybrid workloads.
Join Kellyn Gorman, a database specialist with 30 years in database expertise, as we go over schema design, indexing, configuration tuning along with a set of practical diagnostics and tuning techniques for the new popular relational database on the block.
Whether you’re new to PostgreSQL or a seasoned DBA migrating enterprise workloads, this session will equip you with the knowledge to identify, monitor, and resolve performance issues with confidence.
Redefining Redefinition: A Deep Dive into Postgres pg_repack vs. Oracle DBMS_REDEFINITION
Mission-critical databases have a unique challenge: the essential ability to perform online maintenance without disrupting applications. PostgreSQL and Oracle take different paths to achieve this, but both offer powerful tools that can reshape objects, reclaim space, and optimize performance with minimal downtime. In this session, we’ll compare PostgreSQL’s pg_repack, (a widely adopted extension for online table and index maintenance) against Oracle’s robust DBMS_REDEFINITION package.
Using demos and real-world examples, we’ll walk through how each technology handles common challenges such as bloat, fragmentation, schema changes, and keeping systems online during maintenance operations. Attendees will see where pg_repack shines, where it differs from Oracle’s online redefinition capabilities, and how to choose the right approach depending on scale, architecture, and operational requirements.
Whether you’re a Postgres fan wanting to add it to your maintenance toolkit or an Oracle DBA exploring what open-source databases can do, this comparison will highlight strengths, limitations, and practical guidance for modern, low-downtime data operations.
Protecting Data Outside the Database When the Perimeter Is Gone but the DBA Is Not
We DBAs have focused on securing the relational database, yet today, the database is no longer the boundary. Data streams into data lakes, analytics platforms, AI pipelines, spreadsheets, SaaS tools, and developer sandboxes. Often this is done without the visibility, governance, or controls DBAs once relied on. When data leaves SQL Server, Azure SQL, other relational databases, traditional security models break and risk accelerates.
This session focuses on what DBAs and Microsoft data professionals can do when the relational engine is no longer the center of data gravity. We will explore how to track data lineage across platforms, apply policy outside the database, and enforce protection even as data is copied, transformed, and shared. Topics include classification, sensitivity labeling, access governance, auditing, and encryption in transit and at rest across Azure-native services and downstream consumers.
Attendees will learn how to build visibility into data movement using lineage tooling, quantify exposure risk, and implement guardrails around data democratization without becoming a blocker to innovation. We will examine real-world approaches for protecting data in pipelines, analytics systems, and AI workflows where the database becomes just one of many sources and often the least visible.
By the end of the session, DBAs will leave with a framework for extending governance beyond the engine, practical tooling guidance, and a mindset shift from “protecting a database” to “protecting a data ecosystem.”
Leading Through Transformation and the Impact of AI to Organizations
We are all aware AI has quickly moved from experimentation to enterprise adoption, reshaping how organizations innovate, compete, and deliver value. For leaders in the Oracle ecosystem spanning applications, databases, and enterprise platforms, the question has become- if AI will impact business, how will we harness it responsibly and strategically.
This keynote explores how AI is driving business model innovation, accelerating digital transformation, and redefining the role of both technology and leadership. We will highlight practical guidance that extends beyond proof-of-concept, from automating complex database operations to augmenting application functionality and decision-making. Attendees will gain insight into the critical balance between innovation and governance, learning how responsible AI practices, which will include ethics, compliance, and security, must be embedded into every initiative.
To complete our journey, we’ll examine the leadership and change management required to succeed in the AI era. For Oracle leaders and decision makers, AI represents more than a tool, but is a catalyst for reimagining operations, empowering teams, and setting a vision for sustainable enterprise growth.
Guard Rails of Data Democratization with AI in Today's World
The age of AI has ushered in an unprecedented era of data democratization. Organizations are racing to empower employees at every level with access to insights, analytics, and even raw datasets, all in the name of innovation and agility. But with great access comes great risk. As we integrate AI models into decision-making pipelines and place advanced analytics tools into the hands of non-technical users, we must ask: where do we draw the line?
This keynote will explore the critical balance between empowering teams with data and protecting the organization from the unintended consequences of overexposure. Topics include:
AI-driven accessibility: How AI lowers barriers to data analysis and why this is both a blessing and a curse.
Security and compliance implications: Understanding the risks of exposing sensitive data to broad audiences, even those internally.
Quality vs. Quantity of Access: Why more data is not always better, and how poorly governed access can lead to bad decisions or even data breaches.
The role of governance in an AI-enabled world: Frameworks for implementing guardrails without stifling innovation.
Attendees will walk away with a deeper understanding of the nuanced challenges posed by data democratization in the era of AI and learn practical strategies for striking a balance and ensuring that access empowers without endangering.
DevOps in the Age of AI: Human Powered Evolution
As artificial intelligence reshapes software delivery, DevOps will not just survive, it will thrive. This keynote explores why, in an AI-powered era, skilled DevOps professionals become even more indispensable in building, guiding, and validating Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, and orchestration at enterprise scale.
AI now enables generative IaC templates and intelligent automation, accelerating infrastructure provisioning, flagging anomalies, and suggesting optimized workflows. Generative AI tools can draft Terraform or CloudFormation scripts, enforce policy compliance, and detect drift, which significantly reduces toil and manual errors. AIOps platforms supplement this with real-time monitoring, anomaly detection, and auto remediation that enhance operational reliability.
Yet AI lacks the advanced reasoning and contextual awareness required for orchestrating complex, multi-environment systems. Skilled professionals remain essential to define guardrails, validate AI-generated outputs, manage edge-case failures, and maintain architectural resilience. Rather than replacing DevOps roles, AI magnifies their impact. It turns practitioners into orchestrators of human-AI collaboration, including prompting systems, reviewing configurations, and making strategic decisions.
Join Kellyn as we explore a future where AI amplifies the DevOps craft vs. replacing it and learn how to empower skilled engineers to steer intelligent, reliable, and secure software delivery at unprecedented scale.
Optimizing CI/CD for Hybrid and Cloud Environments with DevOps and AI
As AI becomes increasingly integrated into software development, optimizing CI/CD pipelines for hybrid and cloud environments requires a balance between automation, security, and governance. This session explores how to leverage DevOps best practices and tools to build scalable, secure, and AI-enhanced CI/CD solutions that support the entire development lifecycle—from code commit to production deployment.
We’ll cover key DevOps principles, recommended tools for automation, testing, and deployment, as well as strategies for integrating AI-driven capabilities to enhance efficiency, detect anomalies, and improve decision-making. Additionally, we’ll discuss how to mitigate AI-related vulnerabilities in the DevOps pipeline, ensuring model integrity, data security, and compliance. Attendees will learn how to implement GitOps, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and progressive delivery techniques while maintaining control over AI-powered automation. Whether you're incorporating AI into your CI/CD workflows or securing an existing pipeline, this session will provide actionable insights to streamline development while minimizing risks.
Mastering Cloud Infrastructure Across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud
As organizations embrace multi-cloud strategies, understanding the nuances of infrastructure services across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud is crucial. This session provides a comprehensive comparison of compute, storage, and networking resources in the three major cloud platforms. Attendees will gain insights into virtual machine (VM) compute options, including vCPU configurations, memory considerations, and network. We’ll explore storage solutions—covering block, object, network attached and file storage—and how to optimize performance, cost, and availability.
Beyond the fundamentals, this session will highlight key architectural patterns, best practices for workload placement, and essential tips for ensuring consistent success across platforms. Whether you're managing cloud-native applications or migrating enterprise workloads, this session will equip you with the knowledge to make informed decisions and maximize efficiency in a multi-cloud environment.
Not If, but When: The Risk to Critical Data with AI
The growing prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) across industries has revolutionized how organizations process, analyze, and leverage data. This increased use of AI also introduces significant risks to the protection of personally identifiable information (PII) regarding vulnerable sectors such as healthcare, fintech, and retail. This presentation examines the critical threats posed by AI to PII data in these industries and explores practical strategies to mitigate such risks.
Healthcare data is particularly vulnerable due to the highly sensitive nature of medical records, patient histories, and genetic information. In fintech, financial transactions and customer data are attractive targets for cybercriminals exploiting AI-driven predictive modeling. Similarly, retail organizations face challenges in protecting customer data, including purchase histories and payment information.
This session will delve into how AI models can unintentionally expose PII through data leaks, re-identification risks, and adversarial attacks. Additionally, the presentation will cover the implications of AI-driven automated decision-making and data model poisoning that can amplify existing biases or lead to incorrect and even discriminatory outcomes.
To address these challenges, we will outline a multifaceted approach, encompassing secure data handling practices, advanced data extract through cloning techniques, and differential privacy. We will discuss implementing privacy-preserving AI models and frameworks that minimize the exposure of PII. Regulatory compliance measures, such as GDPR and CCPA, will be highlighted to ensure legal safeguards are integrated into AI data processing.
By the end of this presentation, participants will have a comprehensive understanding of the risks AI poses to PII in healthcare, fintech, and retail, as well as a set of actionable recommendations to enhance data security and privacy, fostering responsible AI usage in these critical sectors.
The Battle for Data Protection in AI and Data Analytics in Today’s World
In today’s era where data is the new nuclear power fueling AI, its protection has become a battleground. From high-profile breaches that shake industries to the ethical dilemmas posed by AI, ensuring data security is more critical and complex than ever. This keynote explores real-world data breach stories that highlight vulnerabilities in the data lifecycle and the profound consequences of lapses in protection.
In this keynote, Kellyn will examine practical strategies for safeguarding data throughout its lifecycle, no matter from creation and storage to analysis and deletion. We’ll cover the importance of emphasizing robust compliance and governance practices. Discover how cutting-edge AI technologies may and have enhanced data protection with AI and machine learning, automate threat detection, and foster proactive defense mechanisms. The goal of this talk is to equip you with insights and tools to navigate the challenges of securing data in AI-driven analytics, empowering your organization to turn this battleground into a stronghold of resilience and trust or at least give you some sense of hope in today’s AI challenges.
Turning ADHD into "Awesome Dynamic Highly Dependable"
ADHD is rampant in IT, but not many talk about how to be successful with a highly distracted mindset. This session will discuss the data behind ADHD, tips, tools and tricks to being successful with an ADHD mind and how to embrace your ADHD super power.
Essential Linux Skills for the DBA
Are you a DBA without a server administrator and need to know everything about Linux? Are you managing linux and want to know more? This is it!
Unlike many other DBAs, the SQL Server DBA is finding themselves managing databases running on Linux without the server support or knowledge of a local Linux Administrator.
This extended session will provide the attendee with a full immersion into the Linux world. You'll learn the history behind Linux, how to design an enterprise level Linux environment to support a SQL Server database and what tools, scripting and monitoring have served other database platforms running on Linux since it's inception. The session will provide an electronic handout that will serve as excellent reference material even after Summit is over, providing continued value to the DBA, the Architect and even the Database Developer.
Adapting and Thriving: Navigating the Intersections of AI, Machine Learning, and Economic Challenges
In an era marked by rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), coupled with significant economic challenges, the role and relevance of technical specialists are under scrutiny. This keynote delves deep into the transforming landscape of technological innovation and economic volatility, guiding specialists on how to not just survive but thrive amidst these shifts.
We will begin by understanding the current scope of AI and ML, highlighting areas where automation has taken precedence and mapping out domains where human expertise still holds a competitive edge. Drawing upon real-world examples, we will debunk the myths of machines entirely replacing technical specialists and shine a light on the symbiotic relationship between human intellect and machine efficiency.
Addressing the elephant in the room, the economic downturn, we will explore strategies that technical specialists can adopt to prove their irreplaceability. By integrating AI and ML into their workflows, enhancing soft skills, and pivoting towards interdisciplinary expertise, specialists can redefine their roles in the industry.
Attendees will leave equipped with:
1. A realistic view of AI's impact on technical specialties.
2. Practical strategies for integrating AI tools into their work.
3. The confidence to evolve, upskill, and navigate a dynamic job market.
In this age, it isn’t just about adapting but leveraging the right mix of human innovation and technology to ensure success. Join us for a thought-provoking session that charts a promising path for technical specialists in an increasingly automated world.
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