Voice of the DBA

I was watching a video called Microservices are Technical Debt. In it, the person being interviewed said that a lot of people really have a distributed monolith. That caught my eye since I've worked …

There are lots of software development methodologies. This page lists a few, among them waterfall, agile, iterative, rapid, and more. What's been interesting to me is that the process of deciding wha…

I've been very pleased with the direction of SSMS the last few years. As it's been separated from SQL Server releases and gets updated more often, I think the changes from v17 though v20 have been im…

Thanksgiving is tomorrow in the US and it is supposed to be a holiday when we give thanks for our blessings in life. My wife usually has everyone in our family tell what they are thankful for this ye…

I was a bit of a math nerd in high school and college. Some of you might have been as well, but I took advanced math all through high school, culminating with AP Calculus as a senior with 11 other ki…

Read the rest of New SQL Server 2022 Functions

In most of the organizations I've worked for or consulted with, patching was always a challenge. Patching hasn't usually been given a priority and is often skipped when operations staff is busy. This…

Microsoft constantly releases new features and products in the data platform space. Many of us have seen the SQL Server product grow in new ways, some of which are very useful to us. As an example th…

Recently I was watching a presentation on how to scale performance in your SQL Server environment and one of the suggestions was setting up Availability Groups (AGs) and having read-intent connection…

I assume most of you work with others in a team. Even if you are the data specialist and others work on different technologies, you still have a team. How long has your current team been together in …

Recently I had a friend traveling who is not very tech savvy. This person has traveled before and has a routine, but in this case, they were struggling to get an airline's mobile app to work. They al…

Today is the first day at the PASS Data Community Summit and I'm in Seattle where I'll get to open the conference and introduce the Microsoft keynote. I'm sure the keynote will be full of announcemen…

For a long time I've felt that my recommendation for people wanting to enter technology wasn't to go to college and get a degree, but rather start to learn on your own and get an entry level job (hel…

Your management gets a great demo from a cloud vendor and decides that the organization needs to implement the new service/application/etc. quickly. Your team tries to comply, furiously learning and …

There's an article at Forbes about the Five Things Business Leaders Should Know about Databases. Disclosure, it's by my boss, but I think it's still a good read. These are points we've learned from …

For much of my career as a younger person, I was mostly concerned with salary at a job, along with the opportunities for my career. I really wanted to know how much money would hit my bank account an…

I own a Tesla, which is essentially a computer on wheels. Much of the way the car works is driven by software, which I love. New features have appeared and minor fixes come through in the same way th…

My wife and I have been thinking about some new audio equipment. We've been a little unhappy with our Bose soundbar because of the software flakiness and sporadic network connectivity issues. In look…

At the Small Data conference recently, one of the talks looked at hardware advances. It was interesting to see a data perspective on hardware changes, as many of us only worry about the results of ha…

These days algorithms rule much of the world. From how supply chains are managed to how vehicles run their engines to the media that many of us watch on the various streaming services. I assume that …