WOW, Steve, I didn't realize that the world is moving in a direction like this. I trust you when you say people (companies) are adopting multiple database platforms that...

A friend got a job and found that the answer to "What DB platforms are you using?  SQL Server, PostGres, Oracle, DB/2, RedShift, MySQL, BigQuery, Snowflake?" was Yes.  In other...

When things are hectic, we don't have the time to explore what we can improve in our development process, even though this has a rapid payback.

One of my colleagues used...

There was a post on LinkedIn that argued that DORA metrics are not a measure of productivity.  The argument was that these metrics measure the speed and success of deployments...

The longer elevated privileges are allowed the harder it becomes to remove them.

Apps get written on the assumption of elevated privileges and any initiative to reduce privileges turns into a...

Every setting has a reason for its existence, even if its just for an edge case.

I wish that, for any tech, there was an explicit set of edge case documents...

I've seen several tools that have started as side-of-desk development to make an individual's life easier.  What started as one person's "make my life easier" project grew to become something...

Walk a mile in someone else's shoes!

A senior infrastructure colleague used to describe people's attitude to infrastructure as being paid for in wooden dollars.  To non-infrastructure people, the real cost...

I worry that there has been a transition from putting in extra hours to get ahead to putting in extra hours just to stop falling behind.

An elite athlete will tell...

The thing with a P01 query is that there isn't much there to tune.

I worked on a system where the DB was under stress from 10s of thousands of calls...

Part of the road to AI adoption is learning what you need to do to build trust in it and which bits you can trust.  There are a lot of...

I work with Snowflake, where the billing is based on compute per minute, with the increasing warehouse sizes having a higher multiplication factor.

If we double the warehouse size, the price...

I worked on a project where the company had 2 big vendor contracts.  The sort where you sign up for 10 years for a figure that would keep someone in...

I worked at a company where the data analysts were paid significantly below market rate.

This became a growing staff retention problem, but HR rules made bulk pay rises for existing...

My youngest son was an engineer for a heritage railway company.  That was a varied job with tight deadlines and often required thinking fast on his feet.

My middle son is...