I wrote this article just over 18 months ago and in that time the entire Hadoop ecosystem has evolved considerably. The whole Big Data space is moving so fast...

My greatest fear is that some tech debt ridden piece of crud gets delivered to live and becomes my headache to support for ever. I get penalised for not...

GoofyGuy (12/22/2014)

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The best management consulting scam I've seen to date was this thing called the Fish Philosophy, which basically told management that they were all "Awesome, yeah!" and that if...

For me it is the people I work with who make it fun.

We have silos as a solution to a defined problem but the silos themselves cause problems. The...

As part of a data governance and stewardship role I have to consider who in my organisation should have access to personally identifiable information, in what context and for how...

Caveat. All answers have an implicit "It Depends"

Q: Why add another unique key when a naturally occurring one already exists?

A: If you have a package...

I don't think it has to be free. The important thing is to minimise discouragements i.e. awkward locations, strange times, high costs, loads of pre-requisites.

To a certain extent these exist already. http://www.meetup.com/

I go to a few of the technical ones and I know people who use them for social events.

I lost loads from my pension pot with Equitable Life so financially my family is more likely to benefit from "death in service" than my pension.

I know several people who...

I had a very candid conversation with someone at board level. Someone at board level of a company quoted on the stock exchange is always likely to be looking...

I've been looking at a product called "Docker" which allows you to spin up a pre-configured machine. One of the guys in the DevOps team used it to demonstrate...

If 9 manager hold a meeting then that is 10 hours productivity gained because they are not distracting other people.

Writing status reports is an utter pain but sometimes necessary. ...

Oooo the illusions of power! As a manager who used to be a DBA I can tell you that life is not any greener on the other side.

Our business...

Nice to see you writing Val. Shame the rest of the guys at Moneysupermarket haven't lost their writing cherry. You all have a huge amount of knowledge to...

You should see the SQL Extensions in AsterData. It would be great to see a few of them in T-SQL for the polybase stuff.