Regarding the picture on LinkedIN thing, I'm not a fan of how I look in ANY pictures of me and actively avoid being photographed if I can help it....

My plan when I reach 60 (in a few years' time) is to ask to take on two people straight out of school or college. I hope to retire...

Good catch. Going too fast on this one and didn't read close enough. Corrected and points awarded back.

I love the second-design idea! That's really cool for pushing people out of their comfort zone. On a similar angle, I like to ask, "Give me a few ways...

I am too, but as I thought about it, and listened to the idea again, it's not that you...

Lol, I've gone digital. My hearing isn't great, and I gave away all CDs a few years ago. Have some albums, but I think we let a kid take them...

I've just given my notice to retire at my current employer (of the last 20 years) after a career of over 40 years as a developer of various types;...

Great analogy. It's not thinking; it's reacting to data and predicting outputs. Magically, sometimes,...

from the hacks, no. I think some of these were guesses, but they...

Apologies, fixed and points awarded back

You can setup auditing, but it's a lot of data.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/auditing-overview?view=azuresql

Yes.

I haven't necessarily looked at all indexes, but I have separated out some tables/indexes that get heavier use and can benefit from different storage paths.

The former, using multiple files, has...

This is a mixed bag for me. I love programming. It is the most interesting thing I do in IT. But where I work, I am not allowed to...

Sorry to hear that. It isn't great to go do something...

I am not a software developer, however recently I had to create an application that downloaded XML and loaded staging then cleaned the data with validation so it could...