My experience is that people in IT abdicate their power and authority.  Many of the problems faced by IT are as a result of this.

Some of the things...

I think siloed thinking rather than over-specialization is the biggest threat.  As people climb the greasy pole the Dunning Kruger affect comes into play.  Expertise in one area...

Your system is only as good as the weakest part.

Security can be a blocker if applied blindly.  I'm finding that for the same reasons that tech debt is...

In a previous position infrastructure was spun up in the cloud with a guid password generated at the time of creation.  Once the configuration of the hardware was finished the account...

I've noticed a trend that occurs in new inventions.
Generation One: We try and use it in almost the same way as the predecessor
Generation Two: Some form of interim...

I was told a story about John Williams the guitar player being asked by a fan what his tips were for bridging.  He had to pause for a while before...

@jeff.  5 integers, datetime, 6 varchars, 2 of which were varchar(max) for the bcp version.

Similar for the JSON version but with some additional attributes and pointless nesting.  I...

If you have known columns represented in fixed width or delimited file there is so little processing to do that it is always going to be fast on any platform.

In the old days of receiving data on 1/2" tape the list brokers used to supply the tapes with 1/2 page of A4 telling you the record format, encoding, number...

In one position I was given a MacBook PRO.  Prior to that I had no experience with Macs other than wincing at the price tag and moving on.  To be...

I've found that when working in a team the database and application work immeasurably better, the development goes much faster and deployments go smoother.
When dealing with remote development teams...

For destructive deployments we had an explicit DBA schema so the relevant data could backed up and be rolled back.  The deployment/rollback usually involved some form of sp_rename for the...

Certainly HIVE gives a sort of SQL called HQL which is based on the MySQL dialect.
Cassandra has CQL, Aerospike has AQL and Couchbase has NiQL.
Apache Spark goes for...