At the start of my career the breadth of technology was narrow.  There were 2 certifications for SQL Server and it was possible to be highly proficient at all areas...

Before COVID I went to quite a few MeetUp events.  The women at these events are often in the minority.  Going to these events when you know you will be...

• This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by David.Poole.

My wife's Skoda has a touch screen display that says "Loading user profile".  Until it has done so none of the other features are available such as Sat Nav, Audio...

We experimented with otter.ai for meeting transcripts.  Nothing wrong with the functionality but we are nervous about the same things as Redgate.

We are also interested in Codium.ai as we are...

I would quite like to experiment with a 3D printer.  One of my hobbies is building model railways and after trying to scratch build the Victorian bridge at Millers...

Entity Framework and various ORMs get a bad rap from DBAs.  In my experience this is down to them being used as an out-of-the-box install with bare minimum configuration.

Many of...

One of the reasons we have SQLFluff in pre-commit hooks and GitHub CICD pipelines is so that standards are enforced for everyone mechanically.  People come and go so mechanical enforcement...

If I might use a car as an analogy, many people do not care about their cars.  They want it to work, they accept that they must put fuel in...

We use git.  Deployments to any shared environment can only take place from the main/master branch.

We develop in short-lived branches and a lot of automated tests and QA tasks.  The...

Looking back at this after 5 years....

• Does ChatGPT and LLMs suggest that English Query was ahead of its time?
• Other DB platforms now allow the extensibility that SQLCLR gives. ...

I feel it is a lazy filter for "are they capable of studying unsupervised".

I've heard...

My career in data started because I (naively) thought that I would better understand human behaviour by collecting and analyzing data.  Nearly 40 years on I understand far less than...

I feel that your most needed confidence is that needed for you to ask questions when you are not sure about something.

One of my biggest regrets is in not having...

I think I read in a Daniel Pink book that we need 3 things to be happy

• To feel we are achieving something
• To feel that what we achieving is...

Over the past decade my role has changed from DBA to Data Engineer.  Put bluntly, I don't think I could manually execute a deployment  of my stack alone, certainly not...