A head up display in my car so I can avoid bifocals a bit longer.

A teenage mood detector to detect which one of the 3 is most likely to be...

Things get badged up as best practice thus sullying the term best practice in the same way that certain practices get badged as agile while actually being bodge it and...

As you noted, in different organisations they have had very different perspectives on what a senior DBA is/does.

Hard depends on what a business expects you to do. SQL Server...

It's entirely artificial to make an HR department think what they do is a science rather than art.

How do you boil down complex behavioural and performance characteristics into a single...

Indie yes. Stock, Aitkin and Waterman not so much.

This topics emphasizes that if long term retrieval is a required then this has to be designed in from day one.

I have worked on a project to retrieve data...

All technologies were immature once.

If your data looks like a document then use a document store. When it looks like a relational dataset use a relational store.

You can get...

I became a DBA because I needed those skills to do what I wanted to do with data.

I enjoy all aspects of database development and in particular get a buzz...

Jeff Moden (11/26/2013)

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Gosh. I believe this is real simple.

The signs should say that you'll be towed after 2 hours UNLESS you register your vehicle with the folks inside. ...

Depends what you regard as SQL Server.

1. The relational engine

2. The column store engine

3. SS IS/AS/RS

4. Full-text search

For me full-text search is disappointing. That is...

I had a lot of fun building software to auto-generate CRUD stored procedures for reference data. It takes a surprising amount of code to generate relatively simple code.

The problem...

NSR = None Stated...

There is a very definite skill in writing a suite of useful tests. You can't approach it as a "check the box" exercise.

Automated testing allows a huge range of...

Which features through the generations of Microsoft Office were regarded as a little clunky?

Early generations of SQLPrompt and SQLRefactor were clunky.

DBCC was a little clunky.

Profiler was a little...

Coming back to this after 4 years the observations I would make is that the world has taken a different path.

People needed a low cost alternative to Oracle, SQL Server,...