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SQLServerCentral Editorial

A New World of Data

I started in the early days of SQL Server, when having a gigabyte of disk storage was unheard of, much less a gigabyte of RAM. My watch has more storage space than the mainframe we replaced with an early version of SQL Server years ago. The technical possibilities and amounts of data we are capable […]

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2020-02-15

118 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Why Getting Data Right Matters

An InfoWorld article from 2017 suggests that 80 percent of a data scientist’s job is cleaning and transforming data, and I believe this is probably only true for organizations that spend at least an average effort in designing and implementing their data storage. These persons who have trained to analyze data using complex math formulas […]

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2020-02-01

172 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Do You Have the Gifts to Be a DBA?

I recently had the pleasure of catching Paul McCartney in concert, and he was amazing. I have been a fan forever and have heard him tell the same stories he over and over with great delight. A familiar tale he tells is about when he wrote the song Yesterday. He woke up with the tune […]

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2019-07-13

320 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Is Forgiveness Possible?

Recently, there was a prominent film director fired from directing an episode in a very entertaining and profitable movie franchise. His firing was for tweets he made that were in very bad taste. And bad doesn’t begin to cover it, they were about topics that were universally despicable. What made this interesting was not that […]

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2018-09-10

52 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Why Volunteering May be a Bad Idea for You

Recently, as I was doing some work for the upcoming PASS Summit, a question popped in my head: “Why am I doing this?” It reminded me of the time when I was young (and idealistic). I went to the leader of a non-profit group asked about making it my permanent vocation. The leader looked at […]

5 (1)

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2018-07-30

64 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Providing Feedback to Speakers

One of the greatest things that has arisen in the past 10 years or so is a veritable stream of great conferences for people to learn how to write better software, many of them low cost or even free. In the Data Platform community, we have had nearly 800 free SQL Saturday events around the […]

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2018-06-18

40 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

What Counts for a DBA – Inspirations

In order to be great, you need to have an idea what great is. A quote I use in every one of my database design presentations is by one of my non-technical inspirations, C. S. Lewis. The quote is from his book, An Experiment in Criticism. “There are no variations except for those who know […]

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2018-02-26

35 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Why deadlines stink, and are so necessary

I hate deadlines. Really. I truly hate them. The problem is: they are usually unrealistic, often not much more than a wild guess. They restrict the amount of time that I can spend in preparation and research so that I can do things right; they squeeze the artistic quality out of my work as a […]

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2017-05-01

42 reads

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