
Christopher Copeland-Gray
Verified Expert in Engineering
Database Developer
London, United Kingdom
Toptal member since March 9, 2021
Chris has 20 years of experience providing data services to companies in a range of sectors. Chris excels in SQL development and data architecture, modeling, and governance. He has been involved in several large system developments, including a pan-European data warehouse, a system to manage the movement of hydrocarbons worldwide, and the design and development from scratch of an Azure-based data platform, along with the team to support and maintain it.
Portfolio
Experience
- SQL - 20 years
- Business Intelligence (BI) - 17 years
- Database Design - 14 years
- Microsoft SQL Server - 12 years
- Database Modeling - 12 years
- Azure SQL Databases - 5 years
- Azure - 5 years
- Data Governance - 4 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Windows
The most amazing...
...project I've developed is an Azure enterprise data platform for a 6,000 strong organization from scratch that integrated with line of business systems and M365.
Work Experience
Enterprise Data Architect
NHS Property Services
- Designed and (largely) built the enterprise data platform. Justified the concept, hired the development team, and integrated all the major line of business systems, and built reconciliations between the sources and ODS.
- Initiated and led on the data quality, data governance, and M365 strategies.
- Developed the low code strategy, integrating power apps and power automate into the existing Azure technology stack, utilizing Teams as a single pane of glass along with SharePoint integration.
- Founded and grew the architecture function to lead on the solutioning of all demands via the technical design authority, including the configuration of the enterprise metamodel in Abacus and architectural reporting.
- Identified cost savings in the range of £2 million over three years by merging different solutions on to the same infrastructure, decommissioning applications that duplicated capabilities, and championing development of functionality that solved multiple needs.
- Defined the method for creating a unified taxonomy to catalog data artifacts for structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data sets, including the infrastructure to allow the business to search for terms across all sources.
- Modeled the business to produce the enterprise logical model (over 250 entities), ensured traceability of this model to the ODS, integrated this with the EA tool (Abacus).
- Designed and ensured the implementation of data lineage between distributed cloud storage products (data lake files, SharePoint, blob storage, and relational data stores), full auditing of each operation, and proactive monitoring of each component.
- Defined the data landscape, specified, then delivered on the 3-year data strategy moving the organization from an Excel-based landscape to incorporating cloud databases, data lakes, and MDM capabilities.
Data Architect
Shell
- Migrated a dozen systems (SQL Server and Oracle) into a global system to manage the shipping business's assurance side in relation to oil, chemical, and LNG products, including ownership of the logical and physical models.
- Analyzed the architectural options for redesigning group working capital and cash utilization reporting and developing the solution I recommended.
- Redesigned the reporting layer for the budgeting warehouse, which allowed the development of accurate sub-second reports and a comprehensive auditing strategy.
- Developed database deployment automation strategies and built the time-saving architecture to do this at crunch points, allowing one person to deploy ten builds a day across seven environment layers with full master data consistency.
- Provided rapid solutions to data problems, e.g., when code in pre-production started to fail at 17:00 on a Friday with the production release the next day, I managed to resolve a timeout by tuning a query taking 30 minutes to execute in one second.
Data Warehouse Architect and Business Intelligence Developer
Gazprom
- Enhanced the existing data warehouse ETL and data mart design for the integration project delivering automated transfer of profit/loss positions and APAR transactions into SAP.
- Implemented changes to the Endur exposure and cash flow SSIS and SSAS OLAP solutions, which allowed the requirements to be delivered to aggressive timescales.
- Developed in a day a proof-of-concept pipeline SQL-based ETL process to load source system data, also used to identify reference data quality issues early in the project.
- Designed and implemented the reconciliation sub-system via TSQL and SSRS reports that analysed the source systems, ODS, and SAP before reporting errors to the business.
- Refactored queries that were executing in 2-3 hours to run in less than one minute by changing the query structures and using materialization to handle growing data volumes.
Data Warehouse Lead Architect
E.ON Energy Trading
- Managed the technical responsibility for all warehousing projects, which consisted of four streams and twenty resources across three countries. Led the design to transform the UK trading system into a pan-European, multi-terabyte solution.
- Designed the ODS data structures and reporting data marts using multiple facts and over a dozen dimension tables, with multiple grains and millions of rows with continuous update.
- Created a solution to report to the business the transformed data accuracy was 100% and that aggregated values, at multiple grains, matched source values 100%.
- Redesigned the data marts to accommodate major changes in requirements, and provided 24/7 availability handling multiple time zone reporting.
- Performed technical oversight for the creation of a data warehouse for calculating trade P&L, exposure and overall positions, and incorporating asset and transportation costs from multiple data sources.
- Created the historical data load mechanism taking into consideration the multitude of data sources (including Oracle and SQL Server), achieving a repeatable load and handling hardware limitations (one node with two CPUs and limited disk space).
Database Developer
GCHQ
- Developed and administered two very large data warehouses using several 32-CPU nodes in a RAC cluster. Managed the large-scale ETL design using parallel loading, external tables, and SQL*Loader.
- Brought significant performance tuning experience on data warehouses, e.g., writing project critical queries to join large amounts of data across three databases, resolving an existing hierarchy of legacy views that had inefficient hints built into them.
- Developed Java software, PL/SQL, and UNIX scripts to interact with these databases for business-specific OLAP processes.
- Improved legacy systems, e.g., I increased the lifetime of a multi-terabyte database by improving the ETL load time by a factor of six.
Experience
Azure Data Architecture
Pan-European Data Warehouse
Large Database Tuning Project
Financial Working Capital Reporting
Data Modeling for Hydrocarbon Transportation
Education
Master's Degree in Advanced Computer Science
University of Manchester - Manchester, UK
Bachelor of Science Degree (Honors) in Software Engineering
Birmingham City University - Birmingham, UK
Certifications
Azure Solution Architect Expert
Microsoft
TOGAF 9.2
The Open Group
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft
Microsoft Professional Database Professional
Microsoft
Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist
Microsoft
Oracle SQL Expert
Oracle
Oracle Certified Professional
Oracle
Skills
Tools
Microsoft Power BI, Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB), Azure Logic Apps
Languages
SQL, Java, C#
Paradigms
Business Intelligence (BI), Database Design, ETL
Storage
Microsoft SQL Server, Database Modeling, Azure SQL Databases, SQL Performance, Oracle SQL, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), Oracle 12c, SQL Server 2014
Platforms
Azure, Oracle, Windows, Azure Functions, SAP HANA
Frameworks
TOGAF
Other
Solution Design, Logical Database Design, Solutioning, Software Design, Data Governance, Data Quality Analysis, Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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