Keep in mind that business intelligence involves a lot of interfacing with internal and possibly external end users. The choices regarding technology and implementation will be handed down from above,...

Tuesday morning I discovered an overnight ETL process running on an Azure IaaS instance had aborted. Yesterday, I was told that Microsoft rebooted our Azure  hosted servers in the process of...

We have come full circle, sharing time on massive regionally centralized computing infrastructures and working with databases that are way to large and impractical to install on our desktop PC...

First, understand how a specific technology (new or old) fits into the overall ecology. Often times the flashy new tools and frameworks are really just an abstraction layer for building,...

I assuming here that you're talking about the 'page buffer cache'. This cache contains recently read pages,which are periodically cycled out using an algorithm based on frequency of usage. The cache...

Steve, you are correct that occasional mistakes should not warrant dismissal. There are various forms of a quote that go something like: If you're not making mistakes, then you're not...

A few months back, I was migrating about 4 TB of databases from a datacenter in Atlanta to New Jersey. Across a 1 GigaBit / sec network connection, there were...

My advice to someone getting started in their career, or looking for a career, is don't let others pigeonhole you into a specific role. Instead, think deeply about who you...

When I'm wearing the DBA hat, I really don't comment much at all regarding the application developer's choice of naming convention, because ultimately they are the one's who have to...

... I was faced with this question of delayed gratification recently outside of work. I was playing one of my time wasting games on my phone. I was tempted...