Voice of the DBA

This is my last day of work. Not forever, just for six weeks. I'm off on my sabbatical after today and won't be back until August 11. However, everything should run smoothly with Grant and Kellyn holding things down until I return. Have a little patience with them as this site can be a bit of a hectic whirlwind at times, and they still have other jobs to do. It's been a wild first half of the year. After very little travel in Jan/Feb, the rest of the year has been a bunch of travel, including most of May and June being on the road. With coaching responsibilities for two teams from Jan-Apr, I am ready for a break. No big plans, but I am looking forward to being at home, playing some guitar, working on a few projects while trying to be very unwired for six weeks. Read the rest of A Well Deserved Break

I ran across an article on the 7 types of tech debt that can cripple your business, which is a great title. It certainly is one that might scare a lot of CTOs/CIOs/tech management. I am sure that much of the IT management gets concerned on a regular basis with how quickly their staff can evolve their software to meet new business needs. The first two items have to do with data, which is understandable. Data is the core of how many organizations operate and move forward, and if you don't have the ability to easily work with data in a flexible way, you can struggle. Many of us technical people know this, but I find many non-data-professional staffers don't get this and are often unwilling to work at improving the situation. They things to just be magically better without changing how they do their jobs. Read the rest of The Technical Debt Anchor

Each time I compile and curate the Database Weekly newsletter, I find lots of Fabric content from the various sources I watch to compose the newsletter. Since I primarily deal with the Microsoft Data Platform stack, this makes sense. Most of the things I am interested in are related to Microsoft, and as a result, I tend to use sources that also use SQL Server, Power BI, Fabric, and related technologies. I do look for other related data items, but I am heavily MSSQL focused. Recently, I stumbled on a piece that contains Fabric Alternatives in AWS, GCP, and OCI. It covers some of the options on these cloud platforms at a very high level. A product name and short description, but it shows there are other choices. I found it interesting that Databricks is mentioned, but not Snowflake. I'm not sure why that is, as Databricks is on Azure (and other platforms) as is Snowflake, but perhaps the author doesn't consider Snowflake a peer? That seems strange. Read the rest of The Data Warehousing Choice

Part of my Redgate work is with customers who need to monitor their database servers. With estates growing quickly, both in scale and types of database platforms used, keeping an eye on everything can be challenging. Add in the lack of staff growing as quickly are the number of servers, and I find many companies seeking out monitoring tools to better help them manage the entire estate.. When someone evaluates a tool, one of the first questions from many people is about load. They are concerned about the load a tool puts on the system, which is always some amount. Most tools say they use less than 2% of total resources, some might hedge at 5%. Hopefully, there's no more impact than 5%, though that might seem to high, especially if you have a busy database server already. Read the rest of Multiple Monitoring Tools

Are you looking forward to SQL Server 2025? Or perhaps you think this is just another release, or perhaps you are not looking for new features or capabilities in your environment. Maybe you don't care about new things, but are looking for enhancements to features introduced in 2017/2019/2022. There is certainly no shortage of things that can be improved from previous versions (cough graph *cough). I ran across an article on the five things that one person is looking forward to in SQL Server 2025. It's a good list, and the things included make me consider an upgrade. Certainly, any improvements in the performance area, especially with all the investments made in Intelligent Query Processing over the last few versions, are worth evaluating. They might help your workload, or they might not, but if they do, then upgrade. Read the rest of SQL Server 2025 Excitement

I had to make a few changes to a SQL Saturday event recently. The repo is public, and some of the organizers submit PRs for their changes, and others send me an email/message/text/etc. for a change. In this case, an organizer just asked for a couple of image updates to their site. I opened VS Code, created a branch, added a URL for the images, and submitted my own PR. After the build, I deployed it. And it didn't work. Read the rest of Patching the Patch

When talking about DevOps, the goal is to produce better software over time. Both better quality as well as a smoother process of getting bits to your clients. There are a number of metrics typically used to measure how well a software team is performing, and one of the things is Change fail percentage. This is the percentage of deployments that causes a failure in production, which means a hotfix or rollback is needed. Essentially we need to fail forward or roll back to get things working. For most people, a failed deployment means downtime. I've caused a service to be down (or a page or an app) because of a code change I made. This includes the database, as a schema change could cause the application to fail. Maybe we've renamed something (always a bad idea) and the app hasn't updated. Maybe we added a new column to a table and some other code has an insert statement without a column list that won't run. There are any number of database changes that might require a hotfix or rollback and could be considered a failure. Read the rest of What is a Failed Deployment?

Many of us are faced with choices and decisions constantly in our jobs. How do we approach a problem? What should we do as a team to get the work done? How do we code or manage or test or do something else with a database? Maybe more importantly, how long do we spend deciding? Read the rest of Shorten the Debate