Applying service packs used to be a process that was weeks in planning and rehearsing.

The number and sophistication of hostile actors these days results in pressure to patch frequently and...

Thank God there's no GOSUB in SQL.

There's a school of thought that gets sniffy at overuse of if statements in OO languages.

Such constructs feel like a vestigal organ like an...

As the Rush lyric goes "you're only immortal for a limited time".

A few months ago I was talking with a friend who was trying to tell his wife that they...

There's a tendency for the % missing skills to be off-putting at a lower figure for women than it is for men.

We spent a lot of time focussing on the...

In my organisation, regardless of whether it is web development, data engineering, DBAs, Data Analysts, Data Scientists everything gets put under a git compatible source control repositories.

Those repositories are viewable...

I've used a variety of ETL tools. SSIS is my least favourite by a long way.

There's an article for Python that illustrates why the CSVReader is so complex and it's...

My Dad is Amazon's greatest fanboy.  At 82 the idea that he can order something and get it same day delivery just blows his mind.  He can remember having to...

I think this is a really important point.  That is a step on...

The big thing that has changed for me in the past 10 years is the size and nature of the deployments.  Project deployments were big things carried out at 2am...

Another thing I was never able to understand - why index tuning is a job for ops?

they are definitely a part of table design, and changes to it should...

I've a goal to get a commit accepted into an open source project.

For me this sets a clear target and a quality gate to reach

I think the biggest gift from the shift to the DevOps culture is in thinking "how do I prove this works" before touching a line of code.

We test far more...

Kristof Kovaks produced a good thumbnail sketch of various NOSQL solutions and has updated his page at least once. https://kkovacs.eu/cassandra-vs-mongodb-vs-couchdb-vs-redis

Web session info and state then something like REDIS works...

Now, if you really want to have some fun, ask people to pronounce the word "tuple".  If they get it right in your opinion, either give them Tulips or Tupperware...

Dr Codd described a relation in a...