Continuous integration is a no-brainer. JFDI.

Continuous deployment makes me nervous from a DBA perspective.

If a deployment means a change to a big table and replication is involved then it...

First, what the <insert your own expression here>?

My expression would be "Kalen Delaney".

Ada Lovelace - possibly the first ever computer programmer.

Grace Hopper "the mother of Cobol"

Frances Allen - Won a...

I saw a program about Bill Gates and comments made by (I think) an IBM exec was that he was a better engineer than the engineers in the room, he...

Don't forget ORM tools. Some of the complexity of what needs to be done either means complexity is pushed into the application or implemented using triggers.

I'm experimenting with an old fashioned technique of dealing with strings using SQL CLR to see if it still has benefit.

I'm also trying to blend in test driven development.

I read about Simonyi and why he prefixed stuff and Hungarian notation is a misinterpretation of his work.

The prefix was to denote purpose but has been misinterpretted as denoting type.

I've...

From an application point of view it doesn't matter whether the underlying object is a table or view.

From a DBA point of view I want the freedom to refactor without...

I'd like to add something with regard to open source software.

1. community editions may be free and will get you started but once you get beyond a certain point...

As Jeff says, it depends on the scale.

But if you are talking about a small business startup I'd say use AWS and one of the RDS options as a starting...

That's outsourced to the VAR in the form of...

Look at Amazon instances. High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large DB = 68GB RAM!

It really depends on what your use case is.

Heavy reads and a large database? You are...

Vendor DBs tend to aim at multiple platforms and this boils down to lowest common denominator design.

If the product states that MySQL is supported expect heap tables in SQL Server...

I think the ownership comment hits the nail on the head.

When we moved to agile roles and responsibilities got blurred and initially things got missed because no-one was sure who...

In the digital marketing space there are actually companies that you pay for the privilege of sharing your data! The idea is that by contributing to the identification of...

On 3 separate occassions my wife has had to call the police.

1. Robbery in progress

2. Gas canister fell off a lorry onto a dual carriageway

3. Assault on...