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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 year. I also see many people posting things they are grateful for during the month of December.
Last month I was lucky enough to have dinner with Bob Ward and we were talking about some of the things we'd seen in travels, often some stressful times for ourselves or others. We've seen many people get upset or angry or have some other reaction. Both of us have some empathy for others, recognizing that we don't really know their history or experiences, and it doesn't make sense for us to get upset. If we knew those things, we might better understand the reaction that someone displays to a situation.
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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 kids (of about 320). In college, I started with Calculus III freshman year and went on to take 7 more semesters of various high level maths. One of those classes included analyzing data with linear regression, which we did with hand calculators and formulae.
At SQL Saturday Pittsburgh 2024, I watched a talk from Jeff Moden on linear regression. It was a trip down memory lane, with Jeff explaining how the process worked, the flaws, and how this technique could be used to do some predictions on data stored in SQL Server. It was a great session on the topic, but I liked that Jeff showed how you can use SQL Server to do various math calculations that might be useful to analyze data. I see applications sometimes programming various formulas, but I don't often see people doing this in database queries.
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Fehlende Folgen?
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Read the rest of New SQL Server 2022 Functions
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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 has resulted in lots of un-patched, or slowly patched systems. I assume this is one reason Microsoft continues to release RTM-GDR patches because some people won't patch at all unless there are critical fixes.
I also know that much of IT management sees patching systems like patching parking lots. Needs to be done, but tomorrow, after we do other important work today.
Read the rest of How Do You Patch 100 Database Servers?
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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 the changes from log shipping to clustering to Availability Groups has improved our HA/DR options as well as the capabilities available to us in different situations.
With that in mind, I saw someone recently that wanted to deploy SQL Server on Kubernetes, which is something that could be a very interesting way of managing your different systems. However, this individual wanted to know when Microsoft would release their own supported solution with a Microsoft operator to manage the instance. There is guidance from Microsoft, but no official operator.
Read the rest of Do You Want a Microsoft Solution?
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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 connections that would query the secondary and not the primary. It's not a bad idea, and the SQL Native Client (and other drivers) support this and make it easy to implement.
The pattern of using multiple connections in an application, one for reads and one for writes, has been suggested often. However, in practice, I've rarely seen this work. Apparently having a connection variable, named dbConn, for writes and a second one, named dbConnReadOnly, for reads is too complex for most developers or teams.
Read the rest of Separate Reads
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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 this form? Have you had a stable team that might have grown, but the rest of the individuals and roles/responsibilities stay the same? Or has your team changed makeup, roles, responsibilities, or something else?
I don't see a lot of organizations that change their team structures often. There may be people who come and go from a team, but the core structure remains the same. Even when your company might reorganize a bit, often it's teams that shuffle between managers, but mostly remain the same. There certainly are exceptions, and some large orgs (Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) regularly shuffle lots of people around, but I'm not sure the teams change their makeup or their mandate much.
Read the rest of Time to Change Your Team
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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 also struggled with the website, and just before the trip, they were thinking to cancel because they didn't have a ticket in their hand before driving to the airport.
This turned out to be a login issue, and between friends and the airline's customer service, they were able to print out a ticket at home and take it in hand to the airport.
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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 announcements on something, but what?
I'm writing this a little over a week before the event, and I have no idea what Microsoft will do. Actually, by the time you read this I may have some ideas as there was a practice session yesterday, but I can't tell you anything. NDA, and really, by the time I got something organized, the keynote will be done.
Read the rest of What's New for the Microsoft Data Platform
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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 (help desk, tech support, etc.) and start to work in the industry. That's a good way to both experiment and understand what you're considering undertaking as a career, as well as limiting your investment. It's also nice to get paid to learn something.
College is great, but it's also expensive. I find that for many people, it can be hard to get a good ROI from college these days. The fast rising cost, not to mention the uncertain opportunities after college lead me not to recommend pursuing a CS degree, or really any degree, as a default view. There are exceptions, but for many people, I'd prefer to work and try to better understand where they should invest in education.
Read the rest of I Need a CS Degree. I Don't Need a CS Degree
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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 experimenting with integrations, software changes, infrastructure configuration, and more. Things get deployed are working. Clients and management are happy with the new capabilities and you breathe a sigh of relief.
After a bit of time there's a security issue and all of a sudden there's blame pouring down on everyone. The vendor takes a hit because it's a public security problem, but the reality might be that your organization didn't completely understand how to configure strong security. The public doesn't blame your organization, but internally your team don't know how to make changes to ensure future security.
Read the rest of The Cloud Security Problem
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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 research and work with customers and prospects at Redgate Software. These points come from you, as well as from executives with whom we work, but there are so many people in organizations who don't think about the complexity of data, so it's a good one to pass along.
The five things are (if you don't want to read): data is growing, getting more complex, there are multiple database platforms in most estates, teams struggle (duh), and data is a business issue. Most of us know about the fourth one, often because we may feel overloaded with work. We might also feel a lot of stress in trying to keep up with not only the workload but also trying to learn more to support the ever-growing variety of systems it seems our employer wants to put into production. I regularly talk with customers whose developers keep wanting to try out a new, shiny database platform in the cloud (or add new features from their existing platforms).
Read the rest of Databases for Executives
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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 and cared most about that. I also wanted to know if I would learn something or get a better title or work with a technology that might help me in the future. That drove me through quite a few jobs in my 20s and 30s, leaving some for more money and more opportunity.
As I got a family, I became more concerned about healthcare since that industry is a mess in the US. Often when I looked at a job, I perused other benefits but didn't give them much weight, mostly concerned with salary and the cost of medical insurance. I also somewhat cared about who I worked with (the team), but that was more for helping me choose between different jobs. It wasn't something I thought of as a reward, though I should have.
Read the rest of Knowing Your Total Reward
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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 that they do for apps on my mobile device. It can be annoying to wait for an update to install, which has happened when my wife or I start the update remotely and don't realize the other is planning on driving. Fortunately, I can set these to run overnight from my phone and they mostly disappear into the background.
I don't worry about Tesla failing, at least, that hasn't been on my mind, but I ran into this article about a company in China that is failing. The WM Motor Company filed for bankruptcy, and perhaps coincidently, their app stopped working. Owners couldn't manage basic functions. The company put the server back up, but that brings up a bit of a concern for software that depends on external connections.
Read the rest of When Companies Fail
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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 looking around, I saw a Sonos product, but after reading a bit about the company's recent history, I decided to look elsewhere.
Sidebar: if any of you have recommendations that aren't high-end $$$$ audio, let me know.
Read the rest of Tech Debt Perils
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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 hardware: can I get my data quickly? In or out, most of us are more often worried about performance than specs. However, today I thought it might be fun to look at a few changes and numbers to get an idea of how our hardware has changed, in the march towards dealing with more and more data. Big data anyone?
In thinking about disks, I saw a chart that looked at the changes from HDD (hard disk drives) to SDD (solid state drives) to NVMe (Nonvolatile Memory Express). These show read speeds going through the list from 80MB/S to 200MB/s to 5000+MB/s. That's a dramatic change, and not one only in high-end arrays. There are off-the-shelf drives you can put in a desktop that read this fast. If you think about some of the early IBM drives, which read at 8800b/s. Growth in disk speed, inside the timeline of our careers, has grown by a few orders of magnitude in read speed.
Read the rest of The Vast Expansions of Hardware
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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 most of you know that algorithms drive what you see on social media, on YouTube, and even the search results you get, and what you see might be different than what I see. There is a constant search for a perfect, or at least, very targeted way of getting you what you want.
Or at least what the algorithm thinks you want. However, is that the best way for algorithms to be designed? It is for the companies that want to profit from your attention, but is this intense personalization better for us?
Read the rest of The Modern Algorithm of Chance
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I'm hosting a webinar tomorrow with this same title: The Role of Databases in the Era of AI. Click the link to register and you'll get some other perspectives from Microsoft and Rie Merritt.
However, I think this is an interesting topic and decided to try and synthesize some thoughts into an editorial today, partially to prep for tomorrow and partly because I'm fascinated by AI and how it will be used in the future.
Read the rest of The Role of Databases in the Era of AI
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I posted a note on Twitter/X with this quote: “The content updates had not previously been treated as code because they were strictly configuration information.” This is from testimony given by Crowdstrike to a US Congressional committee in trying to explain how they grounded much of the airline industry a few months ago. That was a mess of a situation, and apparently, the vendor didn't think their configuration was part of their code.
That's an amazing viewpoint to me. The fact that any developer or manager thinks that their configuration data isn't a part of their code is worth testing. Yet, I see this attitude all the time, where developers, QA, managers, and more think that the code is the only thing that changes or doesn't change, ignoring the fact that there are configuration items that affect the code and need to be managed appropriately. Certainly, if the config data were in enums rather than in a file or database they'd feel differently.
Read the rest of Everything is Code
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I get a tech newsletter most days, which has news that I enjoy, but interspersed among the news and ads are projects, frameworks, or repos, most of which I've never heard of before. I used to read these, but it seems that there is an endless list of these, which all have marketing descriptions that somehow claim this set of code solves problems that others don't or that this code is easy to use and integrate with, or well, I don't know what other promises. I'm usually turned off by the end of the first sentence.
The thing I've noticed is that there are so many projects out there. Even in the database space, if I happen to read a discussion on some aspect of databases, such as database deployment frameworks, I'll see links to technologies I've never heard of in my life. Some are small projects, and some are small companies, but there is an amazing variety of solutions for any tech problem. I'm not sure most of them are much different from the others, but the Not Invented Here syndrome seems to be everywhere. These observations also remind me of just how vast the world is and how little I see of it on a daily basis.
Read the rest of Keep. It. Simple.
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