A Well Deserved Break
Voice of the DBA
This is my last day of work. Not forever, just for six weeks. I'm off on after today and won't be back until August 11. However, everything should run smoothly with and holding things down until I return. Have a little patience with them as this site can be a bit of a hectic whirlwind at times, and they still have other jobs to do. It's been a wild first half of the year. After very little travel in Jan/Feb, the rest of the year has been a bunch of travel, including most of May and June being on the road. With coaching responsibilities for two teams from Jan-Apr, I am ready for a break. No...
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The Technical Debt Anchor
Voice of the DBA
I ran across an article on the , which is a great title. It certainly is one that might scare a lot of CTOs/CIOs/tech management. I am sure that much of the IT management gets concerned on a regular basis with how quickly their staff can evolve their software to meet new business needs. The first two items have to do with data, which is understandable. Data is the core of how many organizations operate and move forward, and if you don't have the ability to easily work with data in a flexible way, you can struggle. Many of us technical people know this, but I find many non-data-professional...
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The Data Warehousing Choice
Voice of the DBA
Each time I compile and curate the Database Weekly newsletter, I find lots of Fabric content from the various sources I watch to compose the newsletter. Since I primarily deal with the Microsoft Data Platform stack, this makes sense. Most of the things I am interested in are related to Microsoft, and as a result, I tend to use sources that also use SQL Server, Power BI, Fabric, and related technologies. I do look for other related data items, but I am heavily MSSQL focused. Recently, I stumbled on a piece that contains . It covers some of the options on these cloud platforms at a very high...
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Multiple Monitoring Tools
Voice of the DBA
Part of my Redgate work is with customers who need to monitor their database servers. With estates growing quickly, both in scale and types of database platforms used, keeping an eye on everything can be challenging. Add in the lack of staff growing as quickly are the number of servers, and I find many companies seeking out monitoring tools to better help them manage the entire estate.. When someone evaluates a tool, one of the first questions from many people is about load. They are concerned about the load a tool puts on the system, which is always some amount. Most tools say they use less...
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SQL Server 2025 Excitement
Voice of the DBA
Are you looking forward to SQL Server 2025? Or perhaps you think this is just another release, or perhaps you are not looking for new features or capabilities in your environment. Maybe you don't care about new things, but are looking for enhancements to features introduced in 2017/2019/2022. There is certainly no shortage of things that can be improved from previous versions (cough graph *cough). I ran across . It's a good list, and the things included make me consider an upgrade. Certainly, any improvements in the performance area, especially with all the investments made in Intelligent...
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Patching the Patch
Voice of the DBA
I had to make a few changes to a SQL Saturday event recently. The , and some of the organizers submit PRs for their changes, and others send me an email/message/text/etc. for a change. In this case, an organizer just asked for a couple of image updates to their site. I opened VS Code, created a branch, added a URL for the images, and submitted my own PR. After the build, I deployed it. And it didn't work. Read the rest of
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What is a Failed Deployment?
Voice of the DBA
When talking about DevOps, the goal is to produce better software over time. Both better quality as well as a smoother process of getting bits to your clients. There are typically used to measure how well a software team is performing, and one of the things is Change fail percentage. This is the percentage of deployments that causes a failure in production, which means a hotfix or rollback is needed. Essentially we need to fail forward or roll back to get things working. For most people, a failed deployment means downtime. I've caused a service to be down (or a page or an app) because of a...
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Shorten the Debate
Voice of the DBA
Many of us are faced with choices and decisions constantly in our jobs. How do we approach a problem? What should we do as a team to get the work done? How do we code or manage or test or do something else with a database? Maybe more importantly, how long do we spend deciding? Read the rest of
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Reflecting on the Mythical Man Month
Voice of the DBA
At an event recently, I had a chat with someone after one of my sessions. I had been speaking on DevOps and ways to better structure your team and build software. After the session, one person asked me if I'd read and if I felt we'd gotten a lot better at building software since that book was published. I do think we have gotten better, way better, in fact. I caught a while back from the Pragmatic Engineer. That view looked at what's changed in 50 years since the first edition, as well as contrasting the world today. You have to subscribe to read that one, but I'll give you a few thoughts...
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IT Unionization
Voice of the DBA
I've been reading sting book that looks at some of the ways that we can better build software in enterprises. One of the side notes in the book is that the tech companies have the funding and the ability to disrupt many other types of businesses, not just technology. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others have delved into other types of industries, potentially pushing others out. We see Amazon becoming as much a shipping and logistics company as they are a retailer. There was a unionization vote, which passed in 2022. Recently, another one failed. Amazon continues to fight these efforts, trying...
info_outlineData storage has always been a concern for data professionals. Early on in my career, we dealt with large ESDI, IDE, and SCSI drives, all of which would fail unexpectedly in servers. Sometimes after a few years, sometimes after a few weeks. We learned to use RAID and tape backups to ensure that our data was recoverable.
In many places tape was the long term storage medium used. These days, I know many people have moved to secondary disk storage of some sort, often rotating data across a few disk types that give you recovery for days, weeks, or longer. I don't know how long term storage work in Azure or AWS, but I assume some sort of combination of technologies are in use. I also know I don't trust them completely to be readily available and recoverable after a few years.
Read the rest of Long Term Storage