You need three things to be happy in life

• To feel you are achieving something
• To feel that what you achieving is worth while
• To feel that what you are...

I think it is good to call out the human side.  An awful lot has been written about Agile and DevOps, not all of it what was intended by the...

I've just had to reset my works password.  That's a day of my life I won't get back, not made easier because the password change is asynchronous.

To be brutally honest...

I find questions like that are usually conversation starters rather than an expression of true interest.

In IT = Well paid, probably intelligent but boring.  Best to gloss over it and...

One caution I would add is that if you operate in a specialist area that only other DBAs will appreciate then you risk being invisible within your organisation except for...

Coming back to this after 4 years and at this stage in my career serves as a timely reminder that all things change.

What I thought I wanted in my 30s...

I really like the idea of companies gaining certification to handle data. There are other areas where companies have to be certified to do certain things such as being points...

Playing fast and loose with the law and using financial clout to avoid consequences is nothing new.  There have been some great factual books and movies on the subject, such...

The NetFlix link posted a few editorials ago shows that even pseudonymised data is vulnerable.  Internally we colour code our data

• GREEN = Public or open data source
• BLUE =...

I've got a sneaking suspicion that the number of fairly modern apps that would run happily on SQL2005 or earlier and not just those who insist on a highest supported...

For me it all boils down to costs.  Any change in licensing comes under the category of "difficult conversation".

The costs in terms of time and effort to upgrade is something...

The ebb and flow of our website traffic is highly variable.  It makes sense for many of the middleware functions to be serverless functions.  The excitement is not about scaling...

We've installed a 3 node porcelain cluster attached to a fibre channel network.

We have determined that extending the paperless office initiative to the bathroom is unacceptable scope creep.

Think of all the millions of man hours that have gone into SQL Server, Oracle, PostGres, MySQL, Teradata, Neteeza etc.  Imagine waking up one morning and thinking that you could...