The year is 1999, somewhere in Cambridge, UK. Kathi, a member of the Data-Philes team, is reading a memo sent from her manager. The memo talks about someone who disrupted a project management meeting in London. He claims he is from 20 years in the future. Chris walks in. Chris: Kathi, have you seen the … Read more
I’ve worked with Microsoft technologies for over 20 years and, during that time, earned a good income to support my family and have a comfortable life. Despite that, Microsoft manages to break my heart again and again. Take the sad saga of the Windows Phone. I was working for Microsoft when the first Windows Phones … Read more
Back when I was working on a master’s degree, one of our professors told us a story about a colleague who learned how to navigate the Unix system. She was so thrilled about learning this new skill that, in her exuberance, she stumbled upon some hidden human resource files containing confidential information. Eventually, an administrator … Read more
In my previous career many years ago, I worked at a hospital along with about ten other pharmacists. The department manager came up with one primary metric for evaluating pharmacists: the average time taken to fill each drug order. While this system did produce a metric, it was the wrong one. The worst pharmacist in … Read more
I was talking recently with a friend about features of SQL Server 2019 (still in CTP at the time of this writing). I thought that while Microsoft provides features that will benefit any size shop, the exciting new feature they are promoting is Big Data Clusters. This feature allows you to query data from many … Read more
Now that school is out for the summer, my grandson Thomas is spending quite a bit of time at our house. This year his parents decided that, at 12 years old, he was too old to go to a day-care/summer camp program. He will probably take over quite a bit of the yard work and … Read more
The process of putting together a team of technical people once was largely centered around getting a group of similarly minded people. How people worked was valued more than how well they could accomplish their job. Finding people who could work together smoothly was a big focus when picking new team members, and was a … Read more
We humans have been the most successful animals on earth. We’ve accomplished this by changing the environment to suit our needs instead of always adapting ourselves to fit the environment. We use tools, we invent, and we solve problems. Of course, many other species use crude tools, but none have done anything like inventing computers, … Read more
A good day for a database administrator (DBA) is a lot like a good airline flight. A lot of excitement in either situation is bad. In a perfect world, a DBA will be productive and not spending most of their time “putting out fires.” (And fires are never a good idea on a flight!) DBAs … Read more
Today I got a bit closer to a meaningful definition of automation as it applies to the software development process. I’ve been turning this concept over in my head for a while, which is partly related to the dreaded question of licensing. Why should licensing an automation product be related to the number of users? … Read more
If you are a Star Trek fan, you’ve seen the future of medicine, or at least how the writers imagine it will be. Painless, needleless injections are given by hypospray devices, right through clothing with no chance of cross-contamination. The medical tricorder provides an accurate diagnosis in seconds. Broken bones, illnesses, and injuries are quickly … Read more
If you have worked with databases long enough, you probably have many frightening stories to tell about things that have gone awry on the job or problems that were difficult to solve. Accidently dropping a table or trying to fix an issue with the CIO standing right in your cube, repeatedly asking if you’ve fixed … Read more
“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things”Phil Karlton I’m terrible at naming things. I recently wrote some quick code to reproduce a design problem and demonstrate several options for solutions, and later realized that I’d named my objects dbo.Foo, dbo.FooFoo, and dbo.Wat. But I feel strongly about a … Read more
NASA recently named a facility in honour of Katherine Johnson, the mathematician who performed the calculations for space flights in the 50s and 60s. She was one of the “human computers” whose stories were made famous by the movie Hidden Figures just a few years ago. Until that movie was released, the contributions of these … Read more
In the years before joining Redgate, I was a SQL Server database consultant. I spent a lot of time doing SQL Server health checks, query tuning, and ETL (extract, transform, and load) development. Every customer was different and getting to the resources I needed to do the job at each shop varied as well. I … Read more
I’ve been speaking a lot on the topic of DevOps lately, and there’s a question I like to ask. What is the purpose of your organization? I get all kinds of answers. “We make software that delights our customers and makes their jobs easier.” “Our company makes low-cost widgets. “ “We make the best gizmos … Read more
I hear from a lot of database administrators who are worried about being automated out of a job. These kinds of worries are not new. Over the course of my career, I’ve seen CTOs outsource large groups of IT jobs to different regions around the world to save money. IT has long been regarded as … Read more
In the past, I was very proud that I’d meticulously defended my projects against scope creep, but I was missing the point. The real reason organizations should undertake projects is to achieve value. What should be the priority, then, defending against scope creep or value-based delivery? The agile movement fundamentally understands this. Its core principles … Read more
If only there were a ‘single version of the truth’ in data and data analytics. Unfortunately, data and everything that derives from it is subjective: it cannot be disentangled from our cultural biases. We can only find the version of the truth that fits the evidence and our cognitive map of the world we live … Read more
Delta Airlines recently announced that they have implemented the first fully biometric terminal in the US, at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport F Terminal with plans for Detroit late 2019. This means that, instead of scanning boarding passes and looking at passports for international flights at the checkpoints, the airline can just scan each passenger’s face … Read more
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Compliant Database DevOps
Standardize team-based development
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