The Managed Cloud Database Options
Voice of the DBA
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Simple(r) Coffee
Voice of the DBA
Starbucks has too many order combinations. about the challenges for their new CEO notes there are over 170,000 combinations of things customers can order. As someone who has visited a store often and stood behind someone placing an order, that sounds like an accurate number. Sometimes I hear people order things to drink that I had no idea were even possible. When there are too many choices, sometimes there can be a delay as the person tries to process the information and make a decision. Some people can't make a decision. Others enjoy the variety and keep making different decisions each time....
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The Lesser Used Functions
Voice of the DBA
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Adding The Right Value
Voice of the DBA
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The Rise of Data Centers Centers
Voice of the DBA
For the last few years, we've seen no shortage of cloud migration stories and felt pressure from management who wanted to migrate our systems to the cloud. It seems that almost everyone I speak to has a story of having to move a system out of their owned or leased data center into a public cloud from some vendor. A lot of this is the movement of VMs from one place to another, which has me scratching my head. If we're just running VMs, surely we can do this cheaper in our own data center. Perhaps, though there are a lot of costs to setting up or running a data center, and it's not easy getting...
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The Learning Plan for 2025
Voice of the DBA
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Comforting Habits
Voice of the DBA
I was chatting with a friend recently about routines and some of the helpful or silly things we do. I mentioned that when I played adult baseball, we often had Sunday morning games and a routine of mine was to drive to town, stop at a 7-11, and get a large cup of coffee and an apple fritter. It was a comforting habit that I still have today, often stopping when I have a morning flight to do the same thing in the way to the airport. Only in Denver though, not when I'm flying out of other cities and returning home. Read the rest of
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Big Data or Small Data
Voice of the DBA
I went to San Francisco for , a conference sponsored by The premise of the event was that smaller sets of data are both very useful and prevalent. The speaks to me, as I am a big fan of smaller sets of data for sure. I also think that most of the time we can use less data than we think we need, especially when it's recent data. That often is more relevant and we end up with contorted queries that try to weight new or old data differently to reflect this. Maybe the best line for me is this one: Bigger data has an opportunity cost: Time. Read the rest of
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Learning to Grind
Voice of the DBA
When I was younger, I had a variety of jobs, but in most of the positions I had to work hard for stretches. Really hard, as in more than 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week. Often as I was starting a new position, it took some time for me to develop some understanding, some skill, and some muscle memory. In some jobs, especially in restaurants, I also had to build the physical skills to be on my feet for many hours. In technology, I've often found myself unsure of how to approach a new position, aware I had knowledge gaps about how things worked, and often, I was naïve or ignorant of some piece...
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The AI/Human Spectrum
Voice of the DBA
I was asked this question recently: is it more likely that AI will replace humans or assist them in their work? It's a good question. If you think about the way AI is being hyped in 2024, many people think AI is, or will soon be, replacing people and we need less of them in work. I guess the simplified view is that AI can do the jobs of many people, but I'm not sure the world is that simple. What I think is more likely is that AI becomes a lever that assists a few people in getting more work done and potentially replacing other, less knowledgable humans. Read the rest of
info_outlineRyan had a planes, trains, and automobiles situation a few weeks ago. On the same day, I didn't. A delay for a few hours, but an easy trip home. Lots of other people didn't have a smooth trip, and I had a few friends who spent an extra night somewhere or had flights canceled and decided not to take a trip. The Crowdstrike outage hit the entire world, causing problems everywhere. Just before that happened, Azure had an outage in the central region.
If you were affected by these, you have my sympathies. If your IT job included responding to these, you get all the virtual hugs from me (and Brent). I know what it's like when someone calls you to handle an outage, and I know it can turn your life upside down. Hopefully, it hasn't been too stressful to you.
Read the rest of Responding to a Disaster