Tracking Table Sizes
Voice of the DBA
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The Job Outlook for Database Professionals
Voice of the DBA
This is a strange time for many technology professionals and their employment. It seems many organizations have open positions and are struggling to fill those slots with qualified candidates (). At the same time, many other organizations have followed the large technology firms (FAANG, MSFT) and in the last year. At the same time, with the hype and rapid growth of GenAI systems, we have companies that are looking to machines to fill some of their labor needs. as their plan was to use AI tech to help them write enough code. They've seen productivity gains with AI tech, so they aren't adding...
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A Poor Data Model
Voice of the DBA
Recently there was some online complaints about social security numbers (SSNs) in the US being duplicated and re-used by individuals. This is really political gamesmanship, so ignore the political part. Just know that social security numbers appear to be one of the contenders used in many data models. I found about how SSNs aren't unique, and have a mess of problems. Despite this, many people seem to want to use SSNs as a primary or alternate key in their database systems. They also aren't well secured in many systems, even though we should consider this sensitive PII data. Read the rest of
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Your Biggest Data Model Complaints
Voice of the DBA
I've been working with databases for a long time and there are no shortage of things I've seen other people do that I don't like. Sometimes I shake my head a little. Sometimes I might groan inwardly (hopefully not aloud), and sometimes I might make an effort to convince someone else to do something differently. Sometimes I'm really annoyed (or angry) and don't even know what to do. Read the rest of
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Why Not Use AI?
Voice of the DBA
Erin Stellato, a program manager at Microsoft, : "why do you *not* want a Copilot in SSMS?" That got me to stop and think a minute. Why don't we want to use an AI to help us? It's a good question, given the hype and (maybe) potential of the technology. While it might not help you now, or with your specific thing, it might help others, so are there good reasons not to use AI technologies, like the GenAI LLMs? Read the rest of
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Trust is a Funny Thing
Voice of the DBA
I caught and there was a point in the article where trust was mentioned. Specifically the reasons that people distrust an AI or tech tool is that it makes a mistake, so they stop using it. A few examples of this were using a writing AI that made a grammar mistake or a GPS routing device that added a wrong detour. In those cases the humans stopped using the assistance of the algorithm because they felt it wasn't trustworthy. What's fascinating to me is that I had this same conversation with a human the day before. Someone mentioned they were working with a group and they misstated something....
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Moving On After a Technology Fail
Voice of the DBA
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Is Ransomware Fading?
Voice of the DBA
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How Much Linux Do You Need?
Voice of the DBA
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The End of Azure Data Studio
Voice of the DBA
I don't know how many of you will be disappointed or impacted by this, but Azure Data Studio (ADS) is being retired, as of 6 Feb, 2024. It will be supported for a little over a year, until 28 Feb, 2026. On one hand I'm not surprised, and on the other, I'm a little shocked by this. I have written , and shown how things work, as well as pointed out a number of things that don't work well in the product or its extensions. These pieces have gotten a number of reads, and people have commented on them, so I wonder if there are a lot of you that are upset by this. Is this going to change the way you...
info_outlineFor 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 a system in place that allows a bit of self-service for our customers. Especially while ensuring that images used are properly patched and secured, while ensuring lots of easy connectivity to storage that can be reconfigured easily. It might not be worth the effort for a few dozen VMs, but if you have hundreds of systems, maybe it is.
Read the rest of The Rise of Data Centers Centers