No system or approach is infallible.  I'll give an example of my latest mistake.

I write tests for the outcomes that are mandated by requirements.  I also write tests to check...

• This reply was modified 7 years ago by David.Poole.
• This reply was modified 7 years ago by David.Poole.

This is following a trend.  At both the AWS RE:Invent and Microsoft Ignite,  Snowflake DB played a prominent role.

Similarly we have Vertica runing in EON Mode.

The local caching...

Where I work the dashboards and performance metrics for production applications and infrastructure is available to all in all environments.

Being told something is one thing.  Being shown is another thing...

• This reply was modified 7 years ago by David.Poole.

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...