Voice of the DBA

way0utwest avatar

  • Collecting Data is Hard

    Data is the lifeblood of much of the world today. Not necessarily big data, and certainly not perfect data, and definitely not just digital data. Organizations, individuals, governments, really everyone out there are making decisions based on data. You might think it’s going to rain, so you cut the grass today, or maybe defer adding fertilizer. Your organization sees demand for a product increase, so it orders more and produces more. Government is always using data to…


  • A New Word: Gnossienne

    gnossienne– n. the awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life. One of the things I’ve learned throughout my life is that we really don’t know what it’s like for others in their lives. What their relationships are like with family, what really matters to them, what really excites/scares/motivates/repels them. We might have an idea, but I always think of this: “Well, we all have a face That we hide…


  • Admin Rights for Everyone

    I was chatting with someone that works at a smaller organization Still a few hundred employees, but the technical teams (dev and ops) were less than 20 in total. They mentioned that everyone had admin rights to the systems as they worked as a team and sometimes developers provided production support. I haven’t encountered that in quite some time. Is it still a thing to give a lot of people administrator writes across many systems? I know…


  • Using the SIGN() Function: #SQLNewBlogger

    I was trolling the docs and noticed the SIGN() function. I have never written this in production code, but it is an interesting function. This post looks at where I might use this and when the need arises. Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. How It Works The SIGN() function works by taking an argument and evaluating if the value is positive,…


  • A Challenge of Our Knowledge

    AI is here to stay. It will evolve, it will get better at some things, and we might decide that it’s not good for certain tasks. It’s a weird, new, different technology that somehow seems magic, extremely intelligent, and at times as dumb as a box of rocks. It can do things that I could never do, or would never do, for myself. Heck, I’m not sure I could or would pay someone to do this by…


VS Live San Diego

Currently Reading

Reshuffle
My current business book recommended by our CEO
The Current Family Book Club book

administration AI Azure Backup/Recovery career career2 car update Cloud Computing coping database design databases Database Weekly DevOps disaster recovery encryption Friday Poll goals hardware Humor life Microsoft misc PASS powershell Redgate republish sabbatical security software development software development speaking SQL in the City SQLNewBlogger SQL Prompt SQL Saturday sql server syndicated T-SQL T-SQL Tuesday Tesla travel vacation windows words work