The one that sticks in my mind was a Finance system that was creaking under the strain.

They took a report extract from some form of reporting tool and put it...

Throughout my career I have had a love/hate relationship with Shadow IT.  I've observed that what people actually want IT to address are small frictions and relatively minor tasks which...

Preparation is key.  Beyond the technical aspects I'd say make damn sure you know what you want from your move.  In my early career my needs were very simple.  I...

I notice that BULK INSERT can be used with OPENROWSET too import Parquet and DataBricks Delta tables.  I just wish there was a BULK EXPORT command.  The bcp utility is...

I started at school on a Commodore Pet, eventually getting myself a Vic20.

When I 1st used a PC there was a choice between DOS and CPM.  WordPerfect was the dominant...

One aspect of a Return To Office shift is economics.  Obviously there is the cost of commuting and office appropriate clothing.  We used to shoulder that as just part of...

I have about 5 years left and have worked over 25 years in an office where I have seen high levels of effectiveness.  Since the rapid movement to 100%...

As long as we are productive we can work in any way we choose.  Some work fully in the office, a minority prefer fully remote, most of us are hybrid. ...

I had an interesting conversation with our CEO about AI, the art of the possible and probable, where the boundaries are etc.

We discussed chat bots and I said that if...

I would prefer DB first because getting the data model right is something that will serve the business functionality well for years and probably serve many generations of applications, not...

At present the percentage of AI generated code I use is very low but not zero.  I use it for things where I know exactly what I am trying to...

I've been acting as a accidental/part-time cloud engineer.

The common theme from when I was and accidental/part-time DBA is that the work ebbs and flows at different layers in the tech...

Infrastructure as Code.  Basically, you sell your soul to the Devil and are forever tortured by Terraform or something worse

I don't know if it is a valid use of feature flags so bear with me.

Most of our infrastructure is IAC delivered by a pipeline.  That pipeline takes about 20...

The Oracle CREATE DOMAIN looks really interesting.

If you are familiar with the dunder functions in Python it looks like the DISPLAY clause the equivalent of Python's __repr__.  For non-Python people,...