In the Amazon world if you are prepared to commit to a time period you can reserve instances at a substantial reduction.

With Amazon RDS instances the operational DBA work goes...

Ditto on the human factor. This becomes ever more important when you reach more senior positions.

The point about working extra hours is well made. There's a challenge to...

Data warehouse in the cloud has to be thought through very carefully.

I think we've done the security concerns to death so enough said on that subject.

RedShift is a column store...

At the SQLBits event in Westminster a few years back Simon Munroe did an excellent presentation on NOSQL and where he saw it fitting in. At the time I...

International considerations are a challenging area.

If you want to operate in a market then you have to abide by the rules of that particular market. Back in the 1980s...

Japie Botma (7/11/2016)

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What about POPI laws? (Protection of Personal Information Act). If your data is in the cloud and the whereabouts of the actual server can change with fail...

I spent nearly 2 years on a project that was intended to put a data lake in the cloud. It turned into an infrastructure/data centre migration project in all...

Diligently using fuzzy logic to produce an answer for the wooly thinkers

I'm not sure about chips having constrained accuracy but there is certainly merit in new search capabilities that approximate a match.

Bloom filters are something I would like to see in...

I had a conversation with someone at a classic car show and they pointed out that they are starting to see a cut-off point for the age of cars that...

So much has changed in the past year let alone the 3 since I wrote the original article.

Some traditional vendors initially lined up behind a particular distribution but have now...

My position is that the data asset is likely to outlive the application. It is also an infinitely reusable asset so has a long period to pay back any investment...

Tom,. I wish I could find the blog post which addressed the elephant in the room which was "define business logic".

The author felt that the term was too vague to...

TomThomson (6/30/2016)

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Item 8 in the list is the sort of careless nonsense that is going to hopelessly mislead schema designers into getting it absolutely wrong if they believe it. ...

The problem with using your email address is that you communicate it to a huge number of people.

Sometimes it is possible to guess someones user name because it is based...