Uli has 18 years' hands on experience as a consultant, architect, and manager in the data industry. He frequently speaks at conferences. Uli has architected and delivered data warehouses in Europe, North America, and South East Asia. He is a traveler between the worlds of traditional data warehousing and big data technologies. Uli is a regular contributor to blogs and books, holds an Oracle ACE award, and chairs the the Hadoop User Group Ireland. He is also a co-founder and VP of the Irish chapter of DAMA, a non for profit global data management organization. He has co-founded the Irish Oracle Big Data User Group. Uli holds degrees in political science from Freie Universit t Berlin, Albrecht Ludwigs Universit t Freiburg, and the University of Ulster, Coleraine. Last but not least, Uli is the CEO of Sonra, the data liberation company. Sonra develops Flexter, a tool to automate the conversion of complex XML to a database, text, or Hadoop.