It's really my pleasure to introduce a very special guest, the Honorable Dr. David Shulkin. Dr. Shulkin has served as the Undersecretary for Health for the Department of Veterans Affairs since June 2015. In this position, he acts as the Chief Executive of the nation's largest integrated healthcare system. Dr. Shulkin has an esteemed professional resume which includes serving as President and CEO of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City and Chief Medical Officer of Three Hospitals and the University of Pennsylvania Health System. As an entrepreneur, he founded and served as the Chairman and CEO of Dr. Quality, one of the first consumer-oriented resources of information for quality and safety in healthcare. Dr. Shulkin has been named one of the top 100 physician leaders of hospitals and healthcare systems by Becker's Hospital Review and as one of the 50 most influential physician executives in the country. I've had the pleasure to work with Dr. Shulkin over the last several months since he's been here and I'm telling you, he is a breath of fresh air and we're so pleased that he took his time today. I know he's traveling coming straight from another trip but I thought it was so important for you to hear directly from VA his vision as the Undersecretary for Health, what they're doing, what progress has been made. I'm honored from Mr. Gibson this morning. I think this will round out our presentation really well and what we're going to be talking about. So Dr. Shulkin, please join us. Give him a warm welcome. Well, thank you very much. I'm really pleased to be here today and so glad that all of you came this morning. I can't tell you how important it is that you're doing the work that you're doing and that you're here to advocate on behalf of veterans coming into VA at this time with so many people targeting us and so much attention that is often not positive knowing that you're there understanding the work that we're doing advocating on behalf of veterans. I can't tell you how important that is and so I just really want to not only recognize but congratulate and thank all of you at DAV for the work that you're doing and giving you a chance to sort of update you on what's going on in VA I think it's going to be important. I'm going to move through this very quickly because it's very hard to tell you all the things that are happening in VA in a short period of time but as Joey said, I had the privilege to join VA about seven months ago. I had not really been in the VA healthcare system for about 25 or maybe even 30 years when I first did my residency in VA. This is the day that Secretary Gibson actually signed me in in July of last year and it's been a very different experience for me coming from the private sector into VA. In fact, the irony is I used to joke when I would run hospitals as the CEO around the country. I used to say what's it going to take to get this done in the hospital and act a congress and it actually turns out that now I say that a lot because almost everything that we do really literally takes an act a congress. But one of the unique things that I have that may be passed under secretaries haven't had is that I do get to compare the difference between what the VA healthcare system does compared to the private sector and quite frankly when I came into the system not knowing as much about the VA haven't had really worked there in 25, 30 years, I guess I did wonder, well shouldn't we just privatize the VA? I sort of had an open mind but I will tell you after being here now over seven months and actually practicing in the VA taking care of veterans, that's where I was coming from on my trip. I was seeing patients, I can tell you that what we do in the VA healthcare system is very different than what happens in the private sector and cannot be easily replicated and would be a big disaster for veterans and for the country to simply throw this system out. So what I have begun to speak about and actually writing about in national journals are the things that happen in the VA healthcare system that are completely different than what happens in the private sector and so you can see on this chart here you know the private sector doesn't provide and I know what DAV does in terms of this transportation it doesn't provide support for caregivers if you don't have a home no one in the private sector is going to go out and work to find you a home. The integration of behavioral health with primary care completely different. The single EMR platform that we have completely different than what you find in the private sector. So it's very important to remind the country about this and in fact particularly for veterans if we were just to send people out into the community you can see from these studies that very few practitioners out in the community actually understand what people who have served this country have gone through just one in five having any type of cultural competency about military service only 13% of those in the mental health field in the community really can speak about military or deployment issues or use the types of therapies that work so much and so the more that I've gotten to know the VA understanding not only how we treat veterans differently clinically but the fact that we train 70% of the doctors in this country through the VA healthcare system the fact that we are doing research the only organizations doing research to specifically help and improve veteran health this is an organization that quite frankly I don't think can or should be replaced by the private sector. The other thing that you don't really get a sense about until you join the VA and have a chance to visit places around the country like I do as the undersecretary you get to see the way that our culture and traditions get carried on that I think is so important it makes it so special. This is actually a picture from a trip that I took to the North Chicago site where it's called the final salute I don't know how many of you have ever seen this but in hospitals again where I've spent my career when a patient passes away they typically as you see on TV will drape a white sheet over them and wheel them in a stretcher down the hall to the morgue which is always at the far end of the hospital in the basement and watching a patient with a white sheet draped over their sheet just being wheeled down the hall can be pretty depressing for other patients who are in the hospital so what they do in the VA now is instead of using a white sheet they drape the stretcher with a US flag and people line up you can see here to give what's the final salute as the veteran gets to be wheeled down so it's turned into a respect and honor tradition rather than one that is depressing and I just think it really speaks to how the VA is different how it treats veterans different I think many of you who have been involved with DAV for years understands that the VA actually provides some extraordinary care this is Phil Longman's book where you know his story where he was hired by one of the national magazines to go out and to do a featured story on find the very best healthcare system in the country and we want to feature them on the front cover of our magazine so he went out to do his research he came back to the editors and said I found the best healthcare system they said that's great where is it he said it's the VA healthcare system they said you're an idiot you're fired and they literally fired him so he went out and wrote a book about this and actually documented years and years ago because I think the book's been out almost a decade now about the very best outcomes in the country what's interesting is is that these same findings are being shown as we speak today this was from the Journal of the American Medical Association two weeks ago their featured study that basically showed that the mortality rates in VA hospitals for conditions like acute myocardial infarction and congestive heart failure are superior to those in the private sector so really the same exact findings that Philip Longman wrote about in his book have been replicated time and time again and last to this day that we just simply are doing a better job than many of the private sector hospitals are doing one of the reasons why we do we are we have the best analytics we can study what we're doing better than almost any healthcare system in the country and again this is a field I've been in a long time this is what we call our sale performance where you can actually see how we're doing in every metric and we're pretty transparent we publish this data you can see that the VA healthcare system overall is improving dramatically year to year we're getting better that's what you would hope our organization would do focusing on things that we can do better and actually implementing performance improvement and you can see everything on the right side in the blue the yellow the green is better the red it means that that's the opportunity that we have to continue to improve on and get better on so we're not we're not where we need to be but this is an organization that every day is getting stronger and better and we have a lot of people helping us to the last count that I had 137 external groups giving us reports and recommendations every single thing that we do is under the microscope and people telling us about about how we can do a better job so when I came into the organization knowing that there's so much public scrutiny obviously knowing the reason I'm here is because there was a crisis in the VA healthcare system primarily started with our wait time crisis I established five priorities for the health system that we're focused on the first is to fix the access issues I'm going to tell you a little bit about that the second is to fix our employee issues to make sure that this is a place that people want to come to work and feel supported and we can fill our key positions the third is to implement best practices the fourth is is to develop what I call a high performance network which I know DAV has some very very good ideas on and the last and probably most important is to restore the trust among veterans in the VA healthcare system and the American public to have confidence in what we're doing so I know we have some work to do there so I just want to tell you a little bit about the progress we've been making and then have you make up your mind whether we're headed in the right direction of course the wait time crisis the access issue starting in Phoenix in April 2014 really put the VA into its current state of crisis but this was not a access crisis that happened in 2014 this had been building for years and years and years and in fact I can go back and find reports from 15 years ago that predicted that this was going to happen and all these events were going on because no one had taken the appropriate steps to make the systematic impacts or improvements that you need to to make sure that we're taking care of veterans in a timely fashion this is actually just data showing that if we just asked veterans themselves these are our patient satisfaction scores you can see the veterans themselves were telling us that there was a problem going on well before the crisis in Phoenix having said that we do have a issue and I will show you how we're fixing it but I do want to remind people so does the rest of healthcare I mean all of you know if you try to go out to your community doctors and again this has been my business for 30 years people in the community have a tough time getting in to see the doctors they need when they want to get them and so if you ask veterans and you ask non-veterans whether they have trouble getting care you can see veterans actually think they have better access to healthcare than most non-veterans this is highly geographic as we know but most of the country is struggling with these same issues when I first got to VA and I began to start asking some questions about the wait time issues it amazed me that no one had actually separated out veterans who were waiting for urgent care things that couldn't wait I have a tumor in my chest versus routine care which is I'm going back to see my primary care doctor for my six month checkup VA had not ever separated that we kept every veteran waiting in a single large list and so the first thing that I did was which I thought was just really basic healthcare management I separated veterans into those that needed care urgently from routine care and as soon as I got my list of 57,000 veterans waiting for urgent care consults we held within two weeks what we called a national stand down we opened up every medical center across the country on a Saturday and we said we're not going to stop until we take care of every one of those 57,000 patients waiting for urgent care whether it means bring them in that day to the emergency room whether it means get them to see a doctor in the community that day and by the end of the day we had taken the list of 57,000 down to 55,000 and today that list is less than a couple hundred veterans the reason why it still is a couple hundred veterans we had wrong phone numbers, people moved, people died reasons that we can't get in touch with those veterans and you can see that we kept sustainability on the number of patients that have urgent care needs being seen right away after that stand down down to a low level so today we're never going to get back to the 55,000 this is a much much smaller number of sustainable impacts on consults now this doesn't mean the wait list for veterans go away you may have to wait a longer time to get eyeglasses, audiograms, non-urgent issues but our first priority is to take care of people who are sick who can't afford to wait and that's where the VA is now focused we are implementing this year in 2016 same day access across the country for primary care and for mental health issues so this is not for every issue that you'll have same day access but if you need to get in to see a primary care doctor and you're having an urgent issue that day by the end of 2016 every medical center in the country is committing to having same day access we have about 50 medical centers out of 150 today that have same day access I can tell you where I was practicing this weekend they have same day access I was there in walk-in clinic any veteran who needed to be seen in Manhattan could be seen that day we need to get that across the country and we will do that by the end of the year we are implementing what we call seamless access which means if you normally get your care in St. Louis but you're traveling and you're in Florida or you're in another part of the country you should be able to walk in and get your care at any VA medical center not hear oh well your home clinic is in St. Louis you have to contact them so by the end of the year we will have implemented a seamless system not only for prescriptions but for all medical care across the country so you can feel safe wherever you travel that you have the VA healthcare system behind you for those who say well what's VA been doing since the crisis we really have been working hard to get more appointments available you can see by measuring the workload of every VA doctor and clinician we are up 10% since the crisis happened so we've just been improving productivity of the average doctor having them see more patients and having more hours this is equated to 20 million additional provider hours of care throughout the system we are growing our telehealth capabilities particularly for veterans who have to travel a lot you can see we now have the largest telehealth system in the country and that's something that we're continuing to invest in and to grow we are learning from one another now across the system believe it or not we had not been doing a lot of sharing about what worked in California with what's working on the east coast now we are implementing sharing of best practices we've actually held our first Shark Tank do all of you watch Shark Tank on ABC? I'm not doing a plug for them but it's one of my favorite shows so we actually held a Shark Tank where we got every VA to submit their best practices, their best ideas we actually had sharks bidding on them and now we have a number of best practices that were committing to spread out consistently across the country so that we are learning from one another and making sure when we learn something's working that we're implementing it consistently throughout the VA healthcare system and we're bringing new innovations to not only VA in the country we just had an announcement two weeks ago that one of our researchers has developed a non-addictive medication for pain that hopefully can replace opioids and everyone knows about the real issues that we have in this country about people being addicted to their prescription medications and this really taking over their life so this would be a major advance something that we're really working on on pain management we're also using new technology you can see this is one of the new kiosks that we're looking to put in certain areas across the country particularly rural areas where you could just walk into a shopping mall or some area where we don't have a facility walk in and using telehealth be able to get your physical exam right in that kiosk so you can see how using new technology new ideas we can bring VA care closer to where people live not have to have them travel hours and hours and be able to get the type of care they need we're developing new ways of identifying veterans who are at risk for suicide using large data sets and predictive analytics being able to identify who's at risk so we don't have to consistently just wait and hear about terrible things that have happened and this is data that's coming out of the VA healthcare system osteo-integration we performed our first in the country osteo-integration surgery at Salt Lake Cities VA about three weeks ago this is where if you need an amputation we actually build the device right into your bone and your skin so that you can actually get a much better feel when you walk and you use the device and it's much easier to switch devices in and out you can see that that's the metal bar being put right into there so it's like a Lego piece where you can actually put your prosthetic right into it snap it off, snap it on and this is the first time this has been done in the country but we think it will become a standard of care in the years to come and finally what I want to just talk about a little bit is about where the VA healthcare system is going it's what I call a high performance network and this is really how do we work with the VA healthcare system and doctors and hospitals in the community to serve veterans best I think it would be a huge mistake to say that VA needs to trim down its services that VA needs to begin to withdraw providing services to veterans I think that if anything we need to make sure the things that we're doing in the VA are world-class and we need to begin to put more resources into them but when we work with the community particularly in our choice program right now we are not making sure that veterans are going to the very best doctors we're essentially sending veterans out to whatever doctors are signing up in the system and that's not the way I believe that we should be doing this so what a high performance network is is actually monitoring the quality and the outcomes of veterans within the VA system which we're doing great but now expanding that to be able to monitor the outcomes and the quality when veterans go outside the VA healthcare system and actually having a command center that's able to track the outcomes of veterans much like NASA tracks the rockets when they send them up in the space because we now have the ability to do that and what it ends up resulting in is our ability to make sure veterans are getting the best care anywhere so they have to leave a VA in Birmingham, Alabama we now have data that suggests that on this if you can see the small print this says that the very best place to go in Birmingham would be Walker Baptist Medical Center and the very worst place to go would be right below it the Baptist Medical Center in Princeton and so what a high performance network begins to do it allows us at VA to use our large data sets to tell veterans where they can get the very best outcomes of high quality care when they should be using VA for that high quality care when there's actually better outcomes outside the VA how they could use it and our role becomes to coordinate the care for veterans no matter where they're getting that care within the VA healthcare system or when they have to go out of the VA healthcare system but that's a very different message than saying that we need to trim back on the VA or we need to privatize the VA duty to make sure that when a veteran does have to go outside of the VA healthcare system we know that they're getting the very best care and we can make sure that their care is coordinated with the doctors who are within the VA healthcare system I did want to just end on these last two slides the most important thing our currency is not to make money in the VA healthcare system our currency is to earn the trust and confidence of veterans in the VA healthcare system and the way that we need to do that is to be open and transparent about everything we're doing the things we're doing well I hope I've shared some of those with you today but also the things that we're not doing well and that we need to get better in and I'm a pretty strong advocate for telling it like it is if there are areas that we're not serving veterans well I certainly want to hear about it and I am not at all ambivalent in the position that we have to do better we have to staff our critical positions with the right people today I have 34 medical centers without a director without a medical center director I don't know how you can restore confidence and trust if you don't have the right people leading your organization so that's one of the things which I'll mention on my last slide that we could use your help with we also need stability for our leadership positions so that's one thing that loses a veteran's trust is when their doctor leaves the VA healthcare system or when there's constant turnover veterans want these long relationships with the people caring for them and we have to do things to keep our doctors and our leaders making sure that VA is a great place to deliver care and we have to make sure that we're empathetic too often I'm hearing stories about the inconsistency in the way it's their healthcare providers and so we have to reemphasize this is a system that is here to serve we have to embrace servant leadership and empathy in what we do so lastly just asking for your help as you go out to speak to members of Congress and I know Deputy Secretary Gibson talked to you about this this morning from my perspective in the health system the things that we really need to help for is we need Congress to allow us to be able to spend money for veterans for care in the community with more flexibility we have money but they're in these very very rigid pockets of money like checking accounts and I can't use one in one account to help spend in the other account and it makes the system complex to use difficult to understand and doesn't benefit veterans so we're asking for that funding and we've given them some proposals provider agreements allows us to go out and contract with doctors and hospitals in the community or nursing homes that are the highest quality nursing homes or doctors or hospitals and we need the ability to contract with them with what's called provider agreements to get the job done we don't have that today lastly the last two the physicians we are only allowed to pay a doctor 40 hours a week in current federal laws many doctors now are becoming what are called hospitalists or they work in emergency rooms that have shifts that work more than 40 hours a week so we're becoming non-competitive as an employer because the private sector can allow them to work 60 hours one week and 10 hours the next week we can't do that so we need the ability to work outside the 40 hour work week for doctors and lastly to be able to get the job done all our spots our leadership spots in medical centers there's 34 medical centers that today I don't have anybody running them we need what's called title 38 funding it allows us to be more market competitive for these positions like the private sector and I can tell you I'm having a tough time finding people to want to take these jobs because the private sector is hiring them away from us so we need that type of flexibility I much appreciate your support and advocacy on our behalf and thank you for everything you're doing on behalf of veterans


Okay, this is a software review where I show you a program that you may not know exists. Now back when I first started using Linux almost 10 years ago, one of my favorite distributions at the time was Knopix or Knopix, depending on how you pronounce it, which was a live CD based on Debian, and it had lots of tools already built in. And one of the things I used to love to do when I first started using Linux was just go through and try every program to see what it does. And one of the programs they had installed by default, which you probably don't have installed by default on your system, but should be in your repository, so check your package or software manager, is a program called Dasher. Now this is not a program that most of us are going to use on a daily basis, but it's fun to play with, and it's for accessibility typing. So mainly if you're handicapped in a way that makes it difficult for you to use a keyboard. And nowadays we have a lot of voice to text, but maybe you have trouble speaking as well. This is a great program to help you type out words. And my wife is an occupational therapist. Years ago when she was in school, she had to do a presentation on an assistive device, and she did a presentation using Dasher. And I haven't played with it a lot in a while, but I was thinking about it the other day, I thought I'd do a video on it. So once you install it, and you open it up, you're going to get something that looks like this. And you can move your cursor around, and as soon as you click over here to the right, you'll see the line down the middle, you'll click and you'll see the letters start flying out at you. And what you do is you just guide to the letters of the words you want to type. And it is smart where it kind of suggests what's coming next. So let's say I want to write, the dog jumped on the bed. I can go down here to T, and I got the. And then the box here is a space, and I can go up to dog. And then I can say, jumped. And if it's going too slow for you, which is kind of slow, I like it up to the speed of two. So I'm going to move that up. So the dog, and I can go up to, and depending on where you move your mouse is how fast it goes. So I can say the dog jumped on the, and you can see that it's typing the words up here. And when you're done, you can copy and paste it from up there. Or another option you have, I'll start this over new, is we can go direct mode, which means you can type directly into a program. So here I have Kate, a text editor, opened, and I can do, let's just do the cat ran. So again, I can go here, I can go the cat, and you can see it's automatically typing over in Kate. The cat ran is what we said, so ran. And there you go. The cat ran is typed into this program. Now I'm using the mouse, which is the default input, but if we go into the settings for the program, you can see you can choose from lots of different languages and then change the controls. You can not only use a mouse, but depending on how limited your abilities are to move, you can actually use lots of different inputs. One of which you can use if you have a single button. You can use a button that, depending on how you click, it goes up and down or stops. Another mode that's a little bit simpler is if you can control two buttons, as you have a two button mode right here. So I'll choose that. I'll click close, and I will start anew. I'll turn off direct mode so I can just make this full screen here. So now instead of using my mouse, I'm going to use my arrow keys up and down. So as you can see, I can do left and right to move forward and back. So if you ever mess up, you can always hit left, but I can go the, oops. It is a little confusing to use if you've never used it before, and it is going kind of fast. So again, this is not a program that you'd use every day, but is something you need to know that's out there, in case you know someone who may be in the need of a program like this. But it's also fun to play with. One of the fun things about it is to, if you just let it go, see what sentences it makes. You can also go into the settings here, and it has a lot of different settings, so you can have it speak when you stop. So it will read it out. It sounds like it's using something like eSpeak as a backend, which is the most natural sounding voice, but you can do that. But I suggest playing around with this. It's just a fun program to play with, and can also be very useful. You can use a keyboard, a mouse, a button input, or even a joystick, all depending on what your abilities are. So anyway, I thought I'd share this to software overview, and I thank you for watching. Please visit FilmsByChris.com. That's Chris of the K. Check out the links in the description. As always, I hope that you have a great day. And if you just leave it going, it makes sentences for you. Have a great day.


2 Corinthians chapter 5. I'm going to set my timer here on this phone so that I don't go too long. 2 Corinthians chapter 5 verse 17. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation. All things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new. Now all things are of God who has reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That is that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ as though God were pleading through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf be reconciled to God. For he made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him. And so as we look at this as is my natural manner of teaching, let me remind you of a few things. Paul had just written, therefore, knowing the terror of the Lord, we persuade men. He had said that in verse 11. And as I was giving that study earlier, I mentioned to you that the term the terror of the Lord is a term that speaks concerning awe. It speaks of reverence of God. You see, it's a reverence that keeps a thoughtless man from desecrating that which is sacred. The biblical and proper fear of the Lord, because there are those who speak concerning it and all in they say fear of the Lord. What do you speak about when you talk about the terror of the Lord or the fear of God? Well, the biblical and proper fear of the Lord has been described as a cleansing fear. It is a fear that provokes us to live in such a way that our lives are purified from sinning in a casual way. You see, in our day, the idea that a man should fear God, well, in our day, that's looked at as being backwards. That's looked at as being primitive. Non-Christians think that it's a superstitious way of thinking. The thought that there's a God that's all powerful is very often ridiculed and rejected. And without knowing it, their attitude is actually something that reveals their nature. You see, there's the Psalm, Psalm 36 in verse 1. It's been referred to as the Psalm of David, the servant of the Lord. And the heading is an oracle within my heart concerning the transgression of the wicked. And then he writes, there is no fear of God before his eyes. That is an oracle, he said, within my heart concerning the transgression of the wicked. There is no fear of God before his eyes. You see, this fear is actually one of the things that God requires from those who serve him. If you take notes Deuteronomy 10, verses 12 and 13, says, now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you? But to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the Lord and his statutes, which I command you today for your good. You see, by the fear of the Lord, man avoids being and doing that which the Lord forbids. The lack of the fear of the Lord is evidence that someone doesn't know God. In the book of Romans chapter 3, verses 16 through 18, it reads destruction and misery are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known. And he goes on to say, there is no fear of God before their eyes. And this is the kind of fear that we are commanded to have that results in a holy life. And it's the kind of fear that actually produces satisfaction. Proverbs 8.13 says, the fear of the Lord is the hate evil. Proverbs 19, verse 23, the fear of the Lord leads to life and he who has it will abide in satisfaction. And so Paul has been speaking of his own sincerity. And as I've been mentioning to you, as we've gone through 2 Corinthians, he's responding to various accusations that have been lodged against him. Now, why would he even respond to accusations?  It just happens. People do that. Just this week, as a regional overseer, as a member of the Calvary Chapel Council of pastors who oversee Calvary Chappals worldwide, I received a letter just this week from somebody out of state who was basically accusing a pastor, a Calvary Chapel pastor who lives next door, accusing him of various things. And so I contacted the pastor and communicated with him and asked him, actually, I sent him the letter that was sent to me, the message that was sent to me and asked him to respond to it. And as I suspected, the charges were not true. The charges were not true because people have a tendency of lodging charges, and very often they'll charge people who are doing well with something that's malicious and wrong. If you're a believer in Christ, if you haven't had somebody say something about you yet, you will. You just aren't old enough yet or just haven't been following the Lord for very long because all of us receive charges. All of us will have accusations. And most of the time, almost all the time, really, we just progress. We just move on. If there are false charges, why waste our time trying to address every one of them? So why is Paul addressing this? Well, in his case, as an apostle, one who is representative of the kingdom of God, an ambassador for Jesus Christ, he has to respond to these things because he's guarding something. He's guarding the purity of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Remember in the book of Philippians in chapter 1, verse 17, how that Paul said that he was appointed for the defense of the gospel. And Paul's view, the gospel was on trial, and he had strategically been placed in the position to defend it. And he knew that his message would be listened to in the context of his character. And for this reason, he knew that he must be a man living a life without reproach. So somebody says, well, why should he care about what people thought? Is it not more important for us to be authentic, for us to be real, to be real before people? Why should he care if people misunderstood him? Why should he care if people brought charges against him? And why should we care? Why did he care? But why should we care? Is it not more important for us to be real? Well, we do care. We care because believers should avoid not only evil, but even the appearance of evil, lest anything make others think less, not of us, but of the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now, when you're appointing somebody to lead a church in 1st Timothy chapter three, verse seven, Paul was laying out certain requirements that were really character traits. And in 1st Timothy three, seven, he had said he must have a good testimony among those who are outside outside of the church. He must have a good testimony among those who are outside, lest he fall into reproach in the snare of the devil. Because a church, it will be judged by its representatives, and therefore anybody who is leading needs to be without reproach. When Paul was writing in Romans two, verse 20, 24, he said, the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you. There are people who watch the way we live and will make their judgments on whether or not the gospel is true based on what they see in us. So why is that important? Because the gospel is the message of life.  That's a normal response from the world and is very often the response of those who profess to be Christian but are really lukewarm. I have found it odd but true that it's more acceptable to paint our faces with our team colors and go crazy at games than it is for us to be in love with Jesus Christ. Paul knew that Jesus had given us, had been given as a sacrifice for us, and that knowledge caused him to love Jesus and to serve him with all of his strength. And Jesus died not only for Paul but he died for the sin of the whole world. In 1 John 2 verse 22, John said, Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for our sins and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world. As mentioned, we have some 65, maybe even more now, countries watching. He died for you too. No matter what country you are in at this moment, you need to know that. Jesus died for your sins also and if you've never given your heart to Christ, today is the day of salvation. Today, I encourage you to do that. You see, this understanding should motivate us to no longer live for ourselves but to live for the Lord. As we're looking at the verses prior to the ones that we're about to address, he had closed in verse 16 by saying that he didn't make judgments using fleshly standards at one time. He did, he judged according to the flesh, he says, but he now no longer does. And why is that? Well, because the world's standard of value made Jesus and his message worthless. That's how Christianity is viewed today. I've said this several times because it's disturbed me that deeply that we're living in a country that you can, some places, are opening up their bowling alleys, their gyms, their marijuana dispensaries. They're opening up abortion clinics, liquor stores, but they want the churches to remain closed. We're worthless. We are not essential. We don't matter. We who love the Lord, it's become even more clear than ever before that we have no value. I went to a Starbucks as I was mentioning earlier to you who are here with me right now. But Marie and I stopped at a Starbucks and you don't go in, you have to go through the line and young man asks me, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'll be having my coffee and then I'll be going to the office to go to work. And he said to me, he goes, what kind of work do you do? And I told him I'm a pastor and I'm part of those who are non-essentials because the church is really non-essential. People like you, people like me, believers gathering together, worshiping the Lord, guys, we are regarded as non-essential. We are not as important as an abortion clinic. Think about that for a minute. We're not as important as a liquor store. Think about that. We're not as important as a bowling alley. Consider that. We are non-essential. We are nothing to some, but we are everything to Jesus. We need to understand that today. And so when people use their fleshly standards to make judgments of Jesus and his message to them, it's worthless. That's because according to verse 12, they only judge according to outward appearance, which is the normal way of making an evaluation. Paul had at one time evaluated Jesus using fleshly means, but he went on to tell us that he no longer did so because Jesus had spoken to him on the road to Damascus, and that's how he had gotten saved. And that salvation encounter with Jesus Christ completely transformed him. And that's what he's speaking about here in verse 17. That was your introduction. Let's get into our study when he says, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation, old things have passed away behold, all things have become new. And so Paul is beginning here to speak of what it means to be born again. At one time, according to verses 14 and 15, we were all spiritually dead, but Jesus died for all so that we could live. And now he's going to expand on what that means. And he makes it clear that salvation has created an entirely new person. We have not been refurbished. We are entirely new. The power of God revealed in the gospel makes it possible for us to be transformed because we need to be transformed because we have what is called a sin nature. And I'm going to develop that with you for just a moment. You see, there are many who believe that human beings are basically good. Many say that it is our upbringing or its economics.  We're simply a product in many people's eyes, or the product of our environment, where the product of our living conditions. And so in that kind of model, and that's the model of the world, and in that kind of model, good is relative. What is considered good by the majority becomes good for everybody. And we normally have a way of enshrining that goodness in what we call our laws. So what becomes legal also becomes moral. And so our society is basically based on what is acceptable being good. When they make these decisions and all, when these things begin to be the way things simply are, what isn't taken into consideration is human nature. For some reason, many find it hard to believe that people are not born intrinsically good. And the ones who believe that, the most of the ones who've never had children, they find it hard to believe that people aren't just born good. It doesn't answer the question related to why people do evil. It just provides an excuse for doing evil. Obviously these things contribute to the expression of evil, but don't provide its origin. Evil, iniquity originated with Lucifer.  So he's speaking to Lucifer. Lucifer is also known as Satan. And he had entered into the garden and he tempted Eve and Adam and Eve to come to the temptation. And that's how sin was introduced to mankind. When you use theological terms, Adam, the first man is called the federal head of humanity. And the children he had, had what he had, a sin nature. And in the book of Romans chapter five, verse 12, it says, sin entered the world through one man and death through sin. And in this way, death came to all men because all sinned. In Adam, we received his nature, all sinned. When he fell, we received his fallen nature. Remember that Adam was created perfect, but he fell through willful disobedience. So we receive a fallen nature, a nature that is in total rebellion against God. Romans 519 says, through the disobedience of the one man, the many were made sinners. The sin nature is the reason for evil because all human beings have sin natures. In Ephesians in chapter two, one through three, Paul said, you he made alive who were dead in trespasses and sins in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind. And we're by nature children of wrath just as the others. They were once spiritually dead in trespasses and sins. We have physical biological life, but spiritually we have no life in us. When we speak of physical death, if you're physically dead, that speaks of the soul when it separates from the body at death, you're physically dead. But spiritually dead speaks of the soul being separated from God.  He spoke of it again in chapter two of Ephesians and he used the word transgressions, which speaks of falling and failing to resist. That word is used some 21 times in the New Testament. He also speaks of sins. And the word sins is a very common word. It's a Greek word that means to miss the mark. It's used in the New Testament very often and it's used something like 250 times. So we're in transgression and sin. And so by nature we're rebellion, rebellious, we're constantly at war with and we're hostile to God. And the Bible makes that clear in Psalm 51.5, I was brought forth in iniquity and sin, my mother conceived me. And Paul said in Romans 8 verse 7, the sinful nature's always hostile to God. It never did obey God's law. It never will. Ecclesiastes 7, 20, there's not a just man on earth who does good and does not sin. The Bible's very clear that we have what is called an endemic nature. It's a sin nature, a fallen nature. And we do evil because it's natural for us to do that. And Paul is addressing that in Ephesians. He says, you used to live in this way when you followed the ways of this world and of the rule of the kingdom of the air. The Spirit, he says, who is now at work and those who are disobedient. In other words, life was consistently lived in trespasses. Trespasses are always, always willful. Transgressions, trespasses, always willful. Sins are not always deliberate. You can sin without even knowing you're doing it. And Paul says we wandered aimlessly. We had no stability. We had no direction. Ultimately, we had no satisfaction. We wandered aimlessly. Why? Because we were spiritually blind. We didn't know why we were created. What is our purpose? And we followed the ways of the world. The ways of the world speaks of the flow. And this is a flow that is directed by Satan, who is referred to again by Paul as the prince of the power of the air. When he speaks of him being the prince of the power of the air, the air is a picture of that which separates heaven from earth. And so there needs to be a connection. And so Jesus Christ came as the one who connects heaven and earth. And for Timothy chapter two, verse five, there's one God, one mediator between God and men. And that's the man Christ Jesus.  Then there's a gulf. Then there's the other cliff that's facing. And then you have a picture of the cross that is placed in that gulf. And you cross over from one place to the other through Jesus Christ. That's why Jesus came. He is the ladder from earth to heaven, Jacob's ladder that you find in the Old Testament. He's the one who makes that connection. And that's why we go to God through him. But prior to Christ again, and I'll finalize a couple thoughts out of the Ephesians passage I quoted, we once conducted ourselves in the lust of our flesh as a result of that. And we fulfill the desires of the flesh and of the mind. And he said we're by nature children of wrath, just as the others. So lust of the flesh is doing what feels good. It actually speaks of deliberately choosing to sin. People sin because sin for a moment brings pleasure. That's why you sin. They enjoy it because it has a momentary pleasure that's involved with it. But what happens is we begin to live a life that is just pleasing our flesh and we become kind of like animals. We satisfy our basic needs. And that's what animals do. Jesus made it clear that man is concerned about what we eat, what we drink, and what we put on. Which is the stuff that all commercials that you watch on TV is based on. What you eat, what you drink, and what you wear. Your material pleasures. The world knows these things and that's why if you watch television, that's why they are constantly pushing you to eat at a certain place to drink a certain thing or to dress in a certain way. Because what we eat, what we drink, and what we put on are the things that are most important. But it's kind of like being an animal. And what happens is we just live for the moment. You see the sinful nature in us craves to satisfy our own inclinations and we'll do whatever we choose to do or want to do because we're fulfilling, as he said in Ephesians 2-3, we're fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind. By nature, we crave to satisfy our own inclinations and we do whatever we want to do. And so the result of that is we are by nature children of wrath. We're worthy of receiving just punishment for our sinful lives. And under these conditions, we were hopeless, helpless to save ourselves. But God, who is rich in mercy and because of his great love, God saved us by his grace. And he made us alive together with Jesus Christ. And in Christ, we have the power to resist. And in Christ, we have the power to change. And in Christ, we have the power to please him. And that's what he's talking about here in 2 Corinthians 5-17, when he speaks of being in Christ. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, is a new creation. All things have passed away behold. All things have become new. Before we were in Christ, we were children of wrath. But now in Christ, we have a new nature. In Christ is a way of saying that we're saved. It speaks of our position. It reveals the depth of a new birth and how incredible it is to be a Christian. It reveals the security that we have because Jesus bore in his own body our judgment. It communicates a participation in the family of God, what he calls the church. We're no longer members of the community of the world. We are now the body of Christ. And even though we were completely antagonistic to him, he showed us his grace. And that's because he is intimately aware of how weak we are and how needy we truly are. There's a Psalm you might want to note this Psalm 103 verse 14, where he simply says, he knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust. That's what we are. We're weak. But that's why I need a savior. And so when I heard that message of the gospel, we'll see this more clearly in a moment. When you heard the message of the gospel, a message that offers us forgiveness, a message that reveals to us what love is, a message that promises transformation, transformation. That's why we received that message. So we could be new. So we could be brand new in Jesus Christ. A new creation, the old things pass in a way. Being in Christ fulfills God's eternal purpose and creation. As new creations, our life is completely transformed and it's all by the grace of God. This new creation has a purpose. We are to bring glory to God. Ephesians 112 said it like this, we who first trusted in Christ should be to the praise of his glory. You see, old things, according to verse 17, have passed away. Behold, all things have become near. That word, behold, is intended to grab your attention. It's like, isn't this amazing? When I was young, and this is something not said anymore, but maybe it is, I don't know. We would say, check this out. That's what we would say. And that's kind of what, in a paraphrase, that's what he's saying. When he says, behold, he's saying, let this grab your attention. Isn't this amazing? He's saying, if anyone's in Christ, he's a new creation, all things have passed away. And behold, like that is that, that word of wonder, he's brand new. You're not refurbished, not rebuilt, you're not redone. You're recreated. This is what is called a note of triumph. Everything is passed away. You're new and you can live. And this, I think, is where the church has really failed to grab hold of this, frankly. You can live as a completely different person. Without going too far into this, I'm trying to be as brief as I can in my study today. But there are quite a number of people that I've encountered, including myself in my earlier walk with the Lord who did not grab hold of this. I didn't grab it. I did not see it. I didn't see it. The way that I do now, it's different. That I can be an entirely different person, not trapped by my own inclinations of my own flesh. That I can be brand new, not the same person. There are just too many Christians who say that's the way I was raised. That's how I was taught to do things. That's just my temperament.  This is real quick. It's not in my notes, but it comes to mind. Do you know how you change? You hate what you were. You hate what you were.  When you get to that point, the life changes. But when you make excuses for yourself constantly, it's just the way I am. People have to get used to it. If they don't like it, that's too bad. That's the most selfish thing that you can do. It's the most selfish way of thinking. It's just pure selfishness. That's what it is. It's self-centeredness. It's narcissism.  How about you? I want to be that new creation. I want all things to be passed away. I want all things to become new, and they have.  No, it's just a temper and it's flesh. But they use, oh, you know, and we cultureized sin. It's just, no, we have to love the things God loves and hate the things he hates, and we need to understand that Jesus died on the cross to set us free from the things that we want to remain with. They won't want to keep. It's like, I have a house, and I gave him permission to work in every room except for one closet. And he stands at the door of the closet, and he says, I want entrance there.  You can have every other room, the front room, the bedroom, you can have, you know, the kitchen, you have everything, but I want to keep this closet for myself. Because in that closet, I have my special sins that I want to open up for myself on occasion, not every day, not all the time, but every once in a while. And he says, I want to go in and clean that one out too. That's what the Lord wants to do in you, by the way, and me. He wants to open up that closet of pet sins and clean it out with the blood of Jesus Christ so that you may know what it means to be a new creation in Christ Jesus. The old things really being passed away, the old way of life, the life that had its prejudice and its lust, its profanity, its sinfulness, that's gone. We haven't been rehabilitated. We haven't been refurbished. We've been recreated. You still look like the same person, but you're new from the inside. And that newness continues because it never grows old.  And that's good news. That's such great news that before Paul came to faith in Christ, he tried to destroy the gospel. The mercy of God and the newness of the life he had in Jesus Christ drove him to serve the Lord. And so he speaks concerning that in verse 18 and he says, all things are of God who has reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. Those all things refers to the blessings of salvation, all things that pertain to it. God originated salvation. God is the author of it. It's His idea. He's made it possible for us to be reconciled. When it speaks of reconciliation, that speaks of a cessation of hostility. You see, sin goes deeper than missing the market. It speaks of a rebellion at its core. It's the desire of the creature to set itself in place of the Creator. It's the desire to place man at the center, the controller of all things. And that is not met with indifference. It is met with God's wrath against sin. We need to remember that God is the master and ultimate authority and He does not tolerate rebellion. In Psalm 7 verse 11, God is a just judge.  Through mercy and grace, God unilaterally decided to deal with sin and He did it through His Son. At the cross, Jesus took the full force of God's wrath against sin and unrighteousness. The Bible says in Psalm 85 verse 10, mercy and truth have met together, righteousness and peace have kissed. Our war against God ended when we became reconciled with Him. And through Jesus, the work of reconciliation has been accomplished once and for all. You see, the gospel is the declaration of reconciliation, guys. The gospel is God's terms of peace. And this peace that we have with God is not a negotiated peace. The peace that we have with God comes through unconditional surrender. There's a difference when the United States became victorious in World War II and Japan surrendered there on the Missouri. We handed to the Japanese representatives terms of peace. And some of you may have studied this in school, and they were unconditional. There were no negotiated peace agreements. It was unconditional surrender where the sword representing Japan was handed to the United States. Unconditional surrender. And that's how you got saved. I don't know if you know that or realize that. You did not negotiate with God to keep certain pet sins because you enjoy them so much. You didn't say, God, I'm going to give you my whole life except for my Friday and Saturday nights because I like to go out with my friends and drink a little bit and party a bit. Or, God, I'm giving you my whole life except for my dating life because every once in a while I like to go to bed with friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, whatever.  That isn't how it works. What I did and what you did when you got saved, maybe you don't realize this, is you said, I unconditionally surrender. You have my whole life, everything, every single thing about me, everything, including the secret sins that you're familiar with that I don't even admit in front of others. Even that area is yours. That's what the gospel of reconciliation is. You see, it's God ceasing the cessation of hostility between a rebellious individual and the victorious God. And Jesus died on the cross and the terms of peace are the gospel. It's unconditional surrender. Try and think for just a moment with me. Can you find a scripture in the Bible? Maybe you can. I haven't found it yet that says, love the Lord thy God with half of your heart or some of your heart, some of your soul, some of your mind, some of it, but not all of it. Anybody know a scripture that says you can be a partial believer? I don't. I don't know when where God says, commit yourself to me temporarily or part-time eight to five with the rest after five is your life. I just don't know where that comes in. Listen, I think that Christianity is weak right now in many ways because we have taken the spirit of the age and we've incorporated into our theological practices and it's become the way we live because we've adjusted our way of life with scripture to the point that we think that scripture can give us permission to continue in sin.  And so I can continue in sin. God knows that I'm weak. He knows my framing. He knows I'm dust. It becomes an excuse instead of an awareness. I am aware of my own weakness and that's why I need Christ. For like Paul said, I can do all things to Christ who strengthens me. But Jesus said without me, you can do nothing. So people look at this kind of preaching. I'm probably losing some people right now as being hard and legalistic. That's only because you've been taught pablum and not the word. You've been taught people's opinions and you've been given permission to keep in sin. Jesus never gave us permission to sin. It's been said, and I like this illustration, it's been said that staying in sin and keeping sin in sin is like kissing the tip of the spear that was driven into the side of Jesus Christ. When you love sin more than you love Jesus, your heart is being exposed. You have to be careful.  That's not legalism. That's called Christianity. That's what Jesus said when he said, pick up your cross daily and follow me. It's a constant death to self. And that's what we're called to in this message of the gospel is the message of reconciliation. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Notice that in verse 19, not imputing their trespasses to them and he committed to us the word of reconciliation. So the Christian has been given a task to proclaim what is called the word of reconciliation. Our ministry of reconciliation is the ministry of proclamation. It's the announcing of good news. And that's why he says in verse 20, therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ as a God. We're pleading through us. We employ you on Christ's behalf. Be reconciled to God. So we, he said, are ambassadors. An ambassador is one who acts and speaks on behalf of the leader of another country. So in a sense, when the ambassador would speak, the one he represented is speaking through him. And this is because they are representing them and they are invested with his authority.  It's interesting how in Matthew 10 verse 20, Jesus said, it's not you who speak, but the spirit of your father who speaks in you. When you quote the scripture with the authority of scripture, it's the Lord speaking to people. That's how it works. Over the years, I've been teaching for a while now, there have been on occasion, those who, well, that's your opinion. Well, if the scripture is rightly divided, then it's not my opinion. If the scripture is rightly divided, it's the voice of the Lord speaking through his word. That's what it is. That's how it works. That's what Christianity actually is. The key is, is it rightly divided? And so the Corinthians were to live out the message of the gospel that they might live in peace with God. But he's also letting them think about the fact that some of them are being influenced by false teachers. And because some of you are being influenced by the false, Paul would be saying, recognize our authority and that it's from God because we are his ambassadors. We are invested with his authority. You must obey God. And you must obey him through his word. And we who are his ambassadors have brought that word to you so that you might know the truth that sets you free and recognize the authority we have in God. Because remember, the false teachers have been entering into Corinth, calling into question the ministry and authority of Paul. And that's why he made it clear in verse 20. Again, that's why he made it clear we are ambassadors for Christ as though God repleted through us. And then he speaks and we implore you on Christ's behalf. Be reconciled to God. You have been rejecting the authority God gave to us. We are representatives of his kingdom. Influencers have come to try and undermine my ministry to you, but you need to understand that we've been called by God to give you his true word. And then he says, finally, in verse 21, he made him who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in him, that we might become the righteousness of God in him. He made him who knew no sin. Jesus died for us. Jesus is the one who knew no sin. This is the witness of Scripture, 1 Peter 2 verse 22. Speaking of Jesus, he committed no sin. No deceit was found in his mouth. 1 John 3 verse 5. You know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins and in him is no sin. He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us. He became the sin offering. He took upon himself the punishment that we deserved. Isaiah 53 says it like this in verse 6, we all like sheep have gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way. The Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He takes away my sin and it gives to me his righteousness. Think about that, that we might become the righteousness of God in him. Think about that, that we might become the righteousness of God, the righteousness of God. What is the standard of entrance into heaven? Perfection. Perfection. Who is perfect? No human being outside of Jesus Christ. How do I get to heaven? I recognize that I am a sinner in rebellion against God, that I have a need for becoming a new creation, a cleansing that comes through the blood of Christ and I need the power of God to be within me, that I might be his temple, that he might work within me and power me, gift me, that I might be sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise and that I might use his word to grow, to become deeper, to understand his ways and to live for him, to no longer make up excuses for the sins, but to turn from them knowing that those sins were what put Jesus on the cross and not to trust in my religious rituals that I might have gone through no matter how wonderful they may be, but to trust in the one who set me free, Jesus Christ, to have a personal knowledge of him and a forgiveness of sins that comes through him. And that's what Jesus would have spoken of as being born again. So if you're listening today, then I would take this scripture as an ambassador for Christ as though God replete through me, I implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God. Get right with him today. Give your heart to Christ. Say, God, forgive me, I'm a sinner. I need you. I have been a sinner. I was born in sin. I sin habitually. I hate it. I want to be turned away. I want to come to you. I want freedom. You can have that today. And if your heart has been touched by that, the spirit of the Lord has spoken to you. This is your moment. And I want to pray with you. You need to open your heart to Christ. So let's pray. And if God has spoken to your heart right now and is said to you, it's time to get right with them. Open your hearts and God be merciful to me. I'm a sinner and ask the Lord to come into your life. You can say, Father, forgive me. I'm a sinner. Jesus died on the cross to save sinners. Jesus died to save me. Forgive me of my sins. Cleanse me. Give me a new life. I will follow you from this day forward every day in Jesus' name. Amen. And if you can do that, you've given your heart to Christ. Please contact us. Let us know. We want to follow up with you.


Like a survey who has heard about cubes dealt with post-rest cubes Not from Trey Gecko No, okay. All right, so have you ever dealt with? Analytical processing like you're using your database not to build your like fast small queries But to actually build an analytical system or a tracking system of user behavior Nope. All right. Good. And that's gonna be useful all right, so Postgres introduced Like let me first explain what the like the problem that we're trying to solve We have you have a like a sales tracking system, right and your customers want to know exactly how things are going compared like to products to locations warehouses to salespeople and you want to be able to dissect your data in In a way that you can for example say get me all locations Knowing that I have these salespeople Between this period in this period get me their total sales for example You want to traverse that in a way? That is almost real time. The problem is once your data grows big You have no way to do this in real time in normal like scenarios So cubes coming to play basically these structures will help you do this For big projects for analytical projects and you can basically use it in your company or your site projects when you want to build that So well, unfortunately, it hasn't been discussed a lot in the rails community. Yeah Yeah So unfortunately, it hasn't been discussed much in the rails community, but It is it has been worked on a lot lately actually and discussed on active record and arrow. So Basically the schedule for this talk would be a Bit of introduction about post-wrest cubes We'll have like an interactive demo of how to build up cubes through a sales database And then some discussions I want to actually have you know your opinions and your thoughts about architecture of how would you place this solution within your current project and How it has been it is being now adapted and used to like refine active record hopefully so Basically From technical perspective we came across a problem in our reporting system Customers who used to have you know Like an average amount of data we can handle the analytical processing pretty fast As soon as the customer grows and becomes like you know one year two years worth of heavy load of data Our system would come to a halt We can like we are the time out because we are restrained by Heroku's 30 seconds response time We have problems with memory loading because active record loads a lot of data Before doing the calculations dissecting your data and then coming up with like a concrete result and so The solution was to actually start exploring How can we make this faster and how can we actually get a result that is almost real time? so Postgres coincidentally when we started considering this problem Postgres 9.5 was in alpha version and in postgres 9.5. There was a very foundational difference in the way they started doing Their internal structures one of these changes was the introduction of three keywords that are sql standard grouping sets roll up and cube These three concepts are very much interconnected now. I'll show you how but These concepts have been roaming around in the sql community when is postgres going to implement those there are like like Standard they're important and they open up a lot of business opportunities and finally one brave guy Decided to take on that project and implement it throughout the whole database system so actually This what happened? hmm So this is basically the change the commit That changed basically everything about postgres post 9.5 Postgres now can become a huge analytical database massive powers And the guy is actually like like there are if you just look up his name a lot of articles about him Basically, so there are other more if it like there are other like private companies that built on top of Postgres or my sql and they had like there's like perkona server, which is a fork and Modification to include those capabilities, but now it's in the open source repository and His work basically included everything he worked on the query optimizer the query planner The syntax the changes in the like back back end front-end changes because postgres is a process-based Engine so like every query that you issue Sponsor process and it has to communicate with the front end to know when the execution is done when the data set is ready to be Serialized so he worked on various part of the system to deliver that and so like if you see the implementation It's quite massive in terms of file changes and and That actually touches every part of the postgres slide code base and the changes are again massive so Basically He explains in his commit the shortcomings of This implementation. It's a very Let me know initial implementation. It gives you the power of cubes But it has few, you know worries you have to be careful around using them I'll explain that later. Um, but basically Um Right that will switch every time I won't switch it Okay, so So this new support for these three syntactic components grouping sets roll up in cubes allowed for online analytical processing capabilities and Multidimensional data analysis use cases which are the like the core components of a cube I'll explain that in detail. Just so let's start out with a very simple scenario. You have a very simple database six records you have a ID a warehouse warehouse one warehouse two and you have a supplier one and two and they have multiple transactions on those warehouses and You ship your data like your your basically items to retailers one and two or one or two And you have three items that you're basically just tracking. It's a very simple scenario, right? Let's look at let's actually create this database or this table What right What all right So I created a temporary table as soon as the session ends the table will be auto-destroyed and Basically, I'm going to insert those records that I just showed you before into the table and Here's our table right. This is the same data set that I have to deal with now Imagine somebody asked you can you get me all? All items totals of items shipped But from warehouse one How would the query look like?  So this is very simple This is what you'd usually do in a real-time application Like this is a simple thing if you have the right indexing it won't take you much time Now things get a bit more complex if I ask you You know I want a one table that gets me suppliers and Warehouses totals in one query Your query is gonna start looking ugly And it will be something like this so you're gonna basically unionized but because Postgres Makes you have like follow the rule that if you're gonna produce a query result The union parts should have the same columns. So you're gonna have something like null as supplier You're gonna add an empty column for part of the query and then do null as warehouse to the other part To make your table look like warehouse supplier item one item a item B item C That looks a bit more ugly and may be annoying to actually maintain what happened is They introduced grouping sets So they said we can actually get you the same result But with less syntax So instead of actually going to unionize and having to go through two indexes if you have actually two indexes on your database The union will force your query to go multiple times to get the data Before joining it in memory and then putting it outside grouping set scans once only one time So now you've got fifty percent better performance just out of grouping set Right, and it's the same exact result set now Let's go into a bit of like a more complex scenario Roll up is one of the concepts that are usually Used when you want to Spread out a tree So let's say I want to know For all warehouses, I want to get the total and then I want to get warehouse by supplier warehouse by retailer and Then get all the all the contributing factors to the total. So basically you're rolling up from one element all downwards That's a roll-up. So usually use that when you're like somebody asks you get me all our supplies from Person a and show me the details of all the small transactions From that person. So you're basically having totals and then one level of detail second level of detail until you reach The most granular level of totals. That's a roll-up.  So you have warehouse is null and supplier is null Meaning I'm totaling everything in the database from a warehouse point of view and then you go based on warehouse one Where warehouse two has a total and then warehouse two has a contributing factor of supplier to Supplier one. So you have the details of each level Now that is Useful, but as you see now, I have three unions. I'm scanning three times worse Here we're talking only about two parts. I'm talking about two columns That those columns are called dimensions everything that is not in a summation that you cannot average or do an aggregation on It's called dimension and everything that you aggregate is called the fact So item totals item one item a and B item C are facts of this roll-up because they are changeable whereas your Dimensions are things that you dissect by so you're rolling up by Warehouse to you're rolling up by warehouse one All the facts about them change based on the level of granularity that you're rolling up against, right? so That is usually common in warehousing applications and a lot of Analysical applications that care about details But as you see it looks ugly and imagine representing that an active record. It doesn't look pretty So the solution is actually This I get the same results better yet. I just have to mention what I'm rolling up against But order matters So the order of the dimensions decide the nesting levels So you say roll up by warehouse then by supplier If I roll up in the reverse order, I get the supplier level first and then the warehousing level second Now here. I had 60% cut of my scanning. I scan once I used to scan three times Right, that's great Now let's go to a more complex scenario a cube so a cube is basically the permutation of All possible changes to your dimension. So if I'm doing dimensions warehouse supplier what I'm gonna get is totals warehouse total warehouse supplier supplier warehouse supplier Basically You're getting every possible dissection of your data imagine how many Index scanning is this like how much performance you have to actually sacrifice to get that result So the query will look like like this So now How many unions do I have here? I have four for two dimensions You will have four unions For three dimensions you will have nine This is an exponential growth Every time you add a dimension. This is three factorial four factorial Five factorial every dimension you add is not a linear growth of your scanning. It's massive massive hits to your database so but With a great one line We get the same result we just say cube Group by cube warehouse supplier. It gets the same data but factorial less scans Whatever's factorial is So this is these are the three new components that are introduced into the new engine that allow you to do massive improvements if you're trying to build up for example your sales dashboard as a company you're probably are tracking your Sales by country, you know your subscription plans your you want to get that data fast And you want your dashboards to be updated pretty fast. That's what you get for free just by upgrading to 9.5 so That's nice. Let me show you now the look of the three dimensions This is a 50 line union to get by three levels By warehouse supplier retailer 50 lines to get 25 rows in my simple database I'm gonna get that with three lines four lines actually because I use order by just for clarity done You got the same result So 50 lines versus four Same data less scans. Let's remember that so basically That's really what the new features of Postgres are about as a company You're probably are thinking of how do you digest massive amount of customer data? Postgres presents it in a very simple manner You don't have to learn much because everything you add is in the group by so instead of saying group by One dimension to dimension you say group by roll-up group by cube group by grouping sets You're just set telling the engine how to group by and it will do that for you. So these are the three Examples and this is the last one with three dimensions and this is the actual cube look So actually like it from from from put like from trade gecko perspective that this is the real motive We did not want to maintain complex code That hits our indexes and database More times and gets the same result like that was very inefficient So we wanted to get that boost and so that's the purpose why we change this so as you see Very simple three concepts grouping set trollop cubes As you saw I can represent them without 9.5 Like you can actually in your current version of database you can build a cube. You'll do more scans you'll just waste more time and And So the the the PR the commits that were contributed actually just built on top of what already existed The nice thing is the performance improvements and the better query of plans that were you know created and Let's keys So I Want to now like discuss with you a bit about architectural stuff How do you think? This would fit into a bigger system I mean in a sense if You're tracking Data and dissecting it and you're a company that has users Would you build the cube for each user? Would you build it per account? How like think about the problem that you would try to solve with this analytical capability? Would you build it per subscription? For example to track all aspects of a subscription all their clicks all the changes per page So you have like a page dimension a click fact Imagine the possibilities. How would that fit into a bigger system? The problem is active record has a static resolution in a sense It expects that every Model maps to a table. That's the default But if I'm building cubes per account or cubes per user I might have the same description of the cube, but I resolve it in real time Based on the person who's querying it based on the API that is being queried Who's the user? What is the login and based on it? I resolve dynamically to the correct Cube to get the data out because remember cubes are extensive as you saw like six records Generated a 25 line cube The problem with cubes is that they do all the possibilities they try to calculate every possible grouping that you might ask for and pre-generate it So if I've had a like a million row table Its cube might be Well like a billion and actually in our own data sets We have some cubes that are beyond 50 gigabytes per cube So like you're talking about a very simple Mathematics that you know you're taking you're trying to optimize for speed, but you sacrifice space. That's a space-time trade-off so and Cubes are not model really Like in a sense. They're not model. They are a calculation when you do group by you basically expect to crunch some records to do some mathematical operation like summation or aggregation and Then you'd get the result so a cube is actually a result of a calculation. It's not a it's all model so How do you store that? If I have a cube that has a 25 or 50 gigabytes of data Every time you request that I have to pre like regenerate the whole 25 gigabytes to get you your own query That's not possible So the problem also comes in when you think how do I store this? How do I cash it? so Of course like database engines have other facilities to store like materialized views which you can refresh Every once in a while the cube will recalculate itself and recache the data and wait and all your queries will hit a cache So you won't have to actually do this every time the user requested same goes for Your pipeline Sometimes your production data is dirty It is not very coherent.  So that's also a concern that you like the concept of cube is very nice But once you start thinking about ah, how does that look like in an actual production system? How does it map to all the abstractions? And as I said the growth of the number of records that you might end up with is huge So how do I optimize like imagine? I have a like as I said 50 gigabyte skew How do I optimize it? Should I create indexes around it? Should I make sure that it's heavily indexed per dimension? Should I minimize dimensions? I shouldn't be very generous The bare minimal that I can get away with I should just build with that. That's it and One other solution possible from the like theoretical foundation of cubes if you read like about that multidimensional Query processing is that they built smaller cubes and then they do a query across them So but the trade-off is a query across cubes is more complex So you're you're sacrificing complexity versus You know speed again. It's it's never it's it's a never-ending thing That's the probably the most difficult challenge You have active record migration Which is very nice in a production system. You might end up with like finding a bug in your cube query It's like, oh that calculation should change or I can't or we can't multiply by this number or like we can't do this equation What do we do I have a production system running relying on a cube and now I have to migrate it I have to change it in real time So how does that look like? You know you might there are I listed a few reasons to change a cube, but I I bet you can come up with more Like you have business rules bugs You want to add and remove the fact you like you tested out you a be tested the cube and you're like nobody's really interested in this type of totals Maybe I should remove it. It's just more space or maybe you want to add the dimension You know your product manager comes in who's like here's what I talked to a customer and if we add this dimension They will love us. They will buy for a year Okay, that's more space Immigration and you have to think about maintaining it. So how do you change your system in real time? There's no foundation That has there's no discussion around how to migrate cubes However, so as I said, these are some of the problems like the architectural problems That you might have now from a trade gecko perspective We've actually had to build that migration system We have in place Immigration system that allows you to swap your cubes in real time and we basically rebuild the cubes offline So imagine you come in and you're like, okay, I want to rebuild the cube now There's already a cube in operation We basically rebuild the other cube under a different alias and When everything is ready to be swapped in one transaction we swap the cubes and we destroy the old one But that is done manually that code is written as a migration framework around the cube concept It is not an active record. It's not in rails. It has to be built so The good news is that the adoption actually started Errol now the like the the the query library that Active record relies on to parse SQL and to actually generate queries Now includes the three keywords for postgres. It already supports That you can actually build up cube queries if you're running natively to Errol now the challenge really is actually how to Build the abstraction inside active record because that is going to be very different than your normal models as I said Cubes are not really models. They're storage is different. They're not actually tables And you've got a problem of active record migration. It's a completely different immigration framework and The resolution can be you know a cube per user a cube per customer a cube or something So it's not really one-to-one relation with your model So that these challenges are all present when you have like to tackle the problem of Building up and extending active record to make it include that. All right. I think I'm done. Thank you very much Any questions? I avoided this project because I hate databases, so I don't know anything about this How long did the biggest query you had beforehand? take so And some of our biggest accounts a query That dissects by three or four dimensions would take up to 12 minutes with cubes We can achieve that in under 30 seconds so let me actually um Show a small demonstration of Our production account This is my test account for cubes basically You can see pretty much that I hope the internet is connected. Well, right so Here I'm doing like a very simple like we are basically Dissecting your sales orders by customer right so we're building Based on your customer and their total sales. Of course everything is fetched. So you have multiple facts in place So you can have all these facts present And you'll get all the data right away Right so all these are facts of the same dimension now. Let's actually add dimensions. Let's start querying for more complex scenarios So let's add a product dimension you know location a channel and An assignee salesperson there you got it That is a sizeable cube of about seven gigabytes of data Right That is a good, you know customer Data, of course you can go as like this is for the last 30 days. I can actually dissect by a year so That won't take much Right the operational power that cubes gives you is that it pre-generates the answers It just pre-generates them. It just has to actually traverse Your cube to get the answers out. It doesn't have to calculate them in real time And of course you can apply as many filters as you want you can complicate your query In a way that you know is limited by You know total sales more than three thousand Gets it right everything is faster when you are pre-computing things But as I said that has a lot of trade-offs around it So you have to think carefully in your own systems. How does that look like? any other questions Cubes have like as a concept have been introduced lately into Postgres I think the real problem is and I think that will be resolved soon Like as soon as developers start interacting with that concept more You will find a lot of small extensions and libraries that come to solve this problem The real issue is integrating it into your Rails code base like that is a big challenge because you have to Incorporate that concept well in a way that feels natural to advanced users advanced developers as much as it's like you know starters any other questions You can't really write to a cube Well, you can't well actually you can't really write a cube because you're storing a materialized view and materialized views are not Right like you can't write to it. I'm sure you've done your research In the past when I was dealing with large complex calculations what I did is Actually create a smaller table in front of it for For those dimensions correct, and then it's for the most queried Queries and then the queries that the user can do is actually method to what is shown in this So we know what kind of queries they're gonna run anyway. That's great So, I mean did you guys do any analysis with you know the point cube versus doing that traditional? Yeah, I think the problem is what you were solving is a completely different Problem than the one that we had to solve our problem was our users wanted flexibility They wanted they didn't want to be limited how they traverse their data and how they look at their operations So in a sense, I could like we couldn't as a team predict You know ah you people are not gonna ask for that Right we had to do like we had we had to build up a structure that allows you to traverse like as you see Imagine yourself as a like a manager or like as a as an admin on this app and you're like, okay Let me try this filter. Let me see this data.  I Might as well leave Any other questions? So actually we are by account we chose by account because we assumed that a We are gonna invent a lot of analytical widgets across the app that As a user you might not be interested in customer data right in like cuss like dimensions of customers But if you go to your customer pages, you're gonna see analytical data showing you statistics and understanding of how customers are behaving So we couldn't actually limit it per user because that would You know be like a lot of loaded data like if I am you and I are on the same account Then we probably have the same cube right and The other part is that we didn't want to restrict it by user because the really interesting thing is that we can embed a lot of information Across the app in a way that makes this application, you know Information rich like more more more information Yeah We have well actually not an inline but active record caused a lot of loading problems a lot of data problems so what we did is we actually like used vanilla SQL for cube building and Data synchronization actually happens on postgres level. It never reaches Ruby level So we use a foreign data wrappers which are extensions to postgres that allow you to synchronize Data postgres to postgres peer-to-peer So our analytical database basically Uses production database to clean up data and pull it up from that level from database level So our application level never pulls the data does the cleaning and then comes back like it's You see That's okay, so that has been resolved by actually building at the correct time We like we did a small survey of when is the least amount of right hits come to our database Yes Actually, you can build that we didn't need to synchronize a lot of nodes But postgres provides that ability if you wanted to if you wanted to you have you'd have to do a lot of like a bit More DevOps work, but we didn't reach that point. We didn't have to This space right, so let's say if the table is standing then the cube is not a thank you. So you actually need 20. Yes How they get all the cubes combined Well, we have around well a bit more than a tarot Is there a product requirement to show data in real time update in real time Actually, that's the that's a problem updating in real time is not efficient So what we when we build a cube we build it per day We wait until your sales per day finish up and then we rebuild Because you know if you think about it like if you have I Don't know like two years worth of data and then suddenly you're you added one order or one sales operation I'm not gonna rebuild like a whole like 10 gigabytes data because I wanted to include one row So like there's a there's there's also effort on making the rebuild operation smarter In a way that it has its own metric You can set up your own business rules around it to say well if you didn't reach this threshold and this update rate Then skip rebuilding the cube wait until tomorrow or recheck your business rule again So in a way that we you don't want to actually consume and as as your name As Marcus said actually the the real problem is hitting your Operational database with reads like you're gonna read a lot from it to build a cube. So It's it's a trade-off. You have to think about it. Well any other questions


So, what are the recent developments? Well, the big news item, I think, which was embargoed until Wednesday of last week was that the center got increased and extended funding significantly and increased and extended. So, now the center is a 36 million center with that funding for the next five years. And so, I always am very grateful to acknowledge the support of Enterprise Ireland and the IDA in funding the center. So, the National Center for Applied AI and the applied part is very important. So, we don't do academic research, our focus is on taking the possible and making it real. So, taking the results of cutting edge research and actually delivering commercial products at the end of it. So, a few updates then sticking to the title of the presentation. So, the center this year was designated the European Union's Digital Innovation Hub for AI in Ireland. And the Digital Innovation Hub is part of this new initiative from what used to be called Horizon 2020 and is now Horizon Europe to really strengthen and support Europe's thrust and move in AI to catch up with the states and China. And these Digital Innovation Hubs will be very much a cornerstone of that. The other thing to update you on as well, and we're delighted to announce this as well, is that we're a co-founder of the Data Science Awards here in Dublin, the Datsys you've probably heard of them. And this year, with the support of the EU and the Big Data Value Association, which is a public-private partnership with industry in Europe supported by the EU, the awards became Europe-wide and now they are the European Data Science and AI Awards. So, that's fantastic recognition for all the work that's being done here in Ireland. And at the recent awards in Croke Park, Irish companies won 50% of the awards, the other 50% were to companies around Europe. So, just a little bit about the centre before we introduce our speakers. So, the centre has got over 82 member companies and we work on a membership basis, so 40% of those are the multinationals, the rest would be Irish SMEs. So, the centre is very much what we call market-led. So, we focus on actually delivering tangible value and competitive advantage for our member companies by taking the recently possible and developing commercial offerings for that. So, Cedar, I've always asked, where does Cedar sit in this very, very complex landscape that exists in Ireland today in terms of all these different research centres practically covering every human endeavour? So, the way I like to position it is that if you look at this spectrum where you have fundamental basic research, curiosity-led research on one hand and on the other hand, you've got business and industry which are there with the whole purpose of staying in business, generating profits, revenue, new products, commercialisations. There has always been this gap between the two and Cedar is this iconographic bridge which sits between those two worlds. So, we work from technology readiness level three up to TRL level nine, so that's actual commercial products. So, what does Cedar provide? Advisory service, so we're a neutral independent player, so companies will come to us and ask for advice in terms of technology and strategy directions and they can rely on us to be unbiased in our assessments. We develop bespoke solutions for companies and we also have one of our, I think, great strengths is this demonstrator programme. So, we've got over 50 of these demonstrators which are all freely available to try out and these are all cutting edge technologies that we've made, hopefully, simple to use so we can set them up with you in your company and you can pump your data through it and hopefully, in a couple of hours time, start to get insights from the data. So, it allows you to use the absolute cutting edge techniques without having to take the financial risk or the technological risk of actually developing them. So, we run a series of business seminars every month very much focused on case studies of AI and analytics and industry. Our workshop series is very popular with companies. We have training and postgraduate apprenticeships as well. These are funded by Enterprise Island 70% funded so the companies get a master's degree in analytics under our supervision 30% of the cost for a year. We help companies on their journey for analytics and AI. Some companies are further down the journey than others are and sometimes we're setting on a lot of data and not know the first thing to do to actually extract the value from it and that's where we can help. And we're heavily involved in bringing our companies into European consortia as well to take advantage of that 100 billion euro pot of funding and business to business brokerage between our ecosystem. So, it's very much a vibrant self-sustaining ecosystem of companies. So, have a look at our website, outputs, our demos. You'll see all these demonstrators, these ones that I said are free to try out. Everything from the latest in machine learning, deep learning to video and image analytics, contact center analytics, real-time analytics, blockchain, you name it. I'm sure we have a demonstrator for it. And so, just a little look into the future, this is my last slide. There's a few funding opportunities available out there at the moment. I just wanted to very quickly bring to your attention the first one are the so-called Marie Curie co-funded fellows. If you go on to the career section of our website, you'll see it. This costs companies absolutely zero, and I mean zero cost, but each of them is worth a quarter of a million. We have 11 of the so-called Marie Curie fellows today in the center. So, they work two years with us, one year with the company, usually two days a week. And one of our speakers, Paul, is actually on this program, so you can talk to him about it afterwards. There's the Work Ready Graduate program if you're looking to have an intern working with you who already has a master's degree in analytics or AI and is more interested in developing his or her practitioner skills, then we're running this program. We'll have 10 of these. And the last thing to say is innovation partnerships. So, these are funded to the tune of 80% by the state. It funds a lot of the work we do, as you can imagine, because again, it's financially de-risked, and it's a very successful thing. And there's an open call for these innovation partnerships, and you can talk to any of the speakers who are all from CEDA after. So, we have four speakers from CEDA, and so the first one up is our principal data scientist, Oshin Boydell, who will be talking to us about reinforcement learning. So, I'll hand over to Oshin now.