It's not just Excel, it's BI in general.

Does BI development go through the same rigour that application development has to? I seriously doubt it!

Excel is particularly prone because its...

I always do the best I can do within the constraints I am given. If it is time and resource constraints and I know that these are not sufficient...

This works fine in favourable business conditions. The true test comes in difficult times where difficult and unpopular decisions are needed.

Committees aren't great at setting directions. The best...

I saw a blog on the Brent Ozar website where his minimum spec for a quad core 2CPU box was 96GB RAM and 2xSSD drives. The charge of over-speccing...

The thing I like about graph databases is that the relationship between nodes is a whole concept in its own right. It performs the equivalent of a link table...

Only needs that to be bi-directional and you've got the solution.

There is an inherent conflict here. A...

I wish that the old SQL functions would be updated with the times to take into account larger data types.

I know that if you change the behaviour of a function...

The more senior the level you are trying to communicate with the less time they have to listen to your case and the more people they have trying to put...

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...