William Brewer is a SQL Server developer who has worked as a Database consultant and Business Analyst for several Financial Services organisations in the City of London. True to his name, he is also an expert on real ale.
Despite some humorous examples of deployments gone wrong, failures are not funny. William Brewer explains why staging is so important and how it can help avoid the types of disasters he recalls in this article.… Read more
Now that the GDPR has gone into effect, many are wondering what will happen in the United States. California is the first state to enact similar legislation, called the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA). In this article, William Brewer explains the history of the law, what it means for companies doing business with California residents, and how it compares to the GDPR.… Read more
Along with the GDPR, regulations require that confidential data is protected and used properly. In this article, William Brewer discusses the ways that data manages to migrate around the organisation and the challenges found in protecting that data.… Read more
The GDPR is in full effect but meeting the requirements may still be confusing for many companies. In this article, William Brewer discusses what is needed to ensure compliance, including when a Data Protection Impact Assessment is required. He also explains the Data Protection Officer role. … Read more
Data governance must be included in DevOps practices. William Brewer explains how to define business policies and standards to ensure compliance with privacy regulations and bring data governance to all aspects of continuous delivery.… Read more
A myriad of laws regulate data retention and generally compete with each other. William Brewer provides an introduction to the principles, but gives good advice -- leave the details to the specialists. … Read more
News reports about data breaches are common occurrences. Even the companies that exist to keep our data safe are not immune. William Brewer answers the question about data breaches that you may be too shy to ask. … Read more
A company’s data is one of its most valuable and important resources. Managing and protecting that data are big responsibilities, and a data governance processes must be put into place to avoid misuse and to meet regulations. In this article, William Brewer answers questions you may have about data governance but were too shy to ask.… Read more
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will be in effect in May of 2018. Data masking is one technique that can help your organization comply with this and other regulations. William Brewer answers those questions about data masking that you were too shy to ask.… Read more
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will affect organisations in countries around the world, not just those in Europe. The GDPR regulates how personal data is stored, moved, handled, and destroyed. Not following the regulation will lead to dire consequences for your organisation. As a data professional or developer, you may have many questions and might be wondering how it will affect the way you will do your job. William Brewer answers common questions about the GDPR that you were too shy to ask. … Read more
How difficult can it be to produce a simple hierarchical list in JSON, YAML, XML and HTML from a SQL Server table that represents a simple hierarchy within an organisation. Well once you know, it is easy and William Brewer is on a mission to tell you how … Read more
There are very few real breakthroughs in IT. Most progress in the industry comes from pure effort and attention to detail. When breakthroughs happen, they are like those famous moments in the construction of Alpine tunnels where two teams, start in separate foreign lands working determinedly for years in opposite directions, apparently digging a bigger … Read more
Microservices can certainly be made to work well for particular types of applications, but is it relevant to the mainstream? Can it replace the traditional architectures of database-driven applications? Microservice architecture is a type of service-oriented architecture that was developed from the concept of Domain-Driven design (DDD) and consists of loosely-coupled services that are network-based. … Read more
Database code analysis will reduce the number of 'code smells' that creep into your database builds. It will alert the team to mistakes or omissions, such as missing indexes, that are likely to cause performance problems in production. It will allow the Governance and Operations team visibility into production readiness of the code, warning them of security loopholes and vulnerabilities. William Brewer describes the two technical approaches to database code analysis, static and dynamic, and suggests some tools that can help you get started.… Read more
The WannaCry ransomware attack has highlighted a serious problem. If there is negligence in your IT strategy, you are increasingly risking the functioning of your organisation, and the privacy of your customers. If you are being careless with data you don’t own, and of which you are legally only the custodian, if you are storing … Read more
Now that there have been well-publicised examples of the awful consequences of data breaches and data misuse, there is increasing public pressure for legislation on privacy and personal data that has enough clout to prosecute serious offenders. In the vanguard has been the EU data protection regulation, soon to be succeeded by the GDPR. It defines IT practices for data that are likely to extend worldwide. William Brewer gives a rundown of what he sees as the implication for IT practice.… Read more
You can produce HTML from SQL because SQL Server has built-in support for outputting XML, and HTML is best understood as a slightly odd dialect of XML that imparts meaning to predefined tags. There are plenty of edge cases where an HTML structure is the most obvious way of communicating tables, lists and directories. Where data is hierarchical, it can make even more sense. William Brewer gives a simple introduction to a few HTML-output techniques.… Read more
Big Data has its origin in science, but it is now being used commercially to increase the information that organizations have about people. This information can uniquely identify individuals and reveal their likes, habits, propensities and wealth. The power of this information is so great that legislation on its use is having to become more … Read more
Let's forget the actual PowerShell code for a moment: Why is PowerShell important? Why should I use it? Where did it come from? Why did it take so long to arrive? These and many other basic questions are answered in William Brewer's latest addition to the series that answers those seemingly simple questions that you were too shy to ask in public.… Read more
Database Lifecycle Management (DLM) aims to provide a roadmap of what is required, and when, to deliver and maintain effective databases that can respond quickly to business change. How does the DevOps movement, as it applies to databases, fit into this? William Brewer explains how DevOps provides the organisational change between delivery and operations to make important parts of the process easier to introduce.… Read more