When I was in college a teacher said "if your IT project doesn't have executive buy-in, its not going to make it to market/production". Over the years I've learned...

It is a lot easier if the company reputation hangs on being seen to do the right thing with regard to customer data.  If the company reputation forms a large...

I have gone through this and the question to them...

In my organisation the DBs are under source control so every morning it is a case of

git pull
./launch-latest.sh

If you try and control everything not only do you become the bottleneck you limit the lessons that others learn.

It's not for everyone but I find being an approachable mentor...

I enjoyed playing with Elastic Search, Spark, Python, Docker, Cloud technologies.

For me the quote that sticks in my mind is that change is inevitable but change for the better is...

@GeorgeCopela

A DBA in a London Bank I remember used to occasionally carry a lightening bolt made from papier mache and painted fiery gold when the Developers did something that...

This comes close to Two Stops Short of Barking.  Looking the part = like someone who has made slightly more successful and profitable decisions than the...

There's acquiring expertise and then there is acquiring recognition for expertise.

The first one requires passion, hard work and opportunity.

The 2nd one is trickier and in this day and age involves...

The Redgate Data Catalog can be controlled using Powershell and/or API calls.  There is nothing to stop you exporting stuff from your read-only DB and using it to generate what...

Ideally the descriptions should all be in the common language of the business.  I think there is a case for a technical description though I would see this as a...

@jeff, how do they know the mid string search will always work? How is that more provable than your method?

There's a bit more to CI than throwing it against the...

I had a driving day for my fortieth.  The Ferrari felt like a knackered Fiat until it hit 90mph when, all of a sudden, it came alive and I thought...

The more you dig into data generation the more complicated it gets.  Even if you have a good data generator configuring it to generate data that looks like your production...

I've had a few of these.  The worse one was a deployment pipeline that rewrote the SQL scripts that it executed while attempting to police what it would and wouldn't...