Voice of the DBA

  • An Eventual Consistency Scam

    Recently I sold a car. It was an interesting process as I hadn’t sold a car to someone I didn’t know in a long time. I listed the car in a few places and was surprised by the interest. It was an EV (I guess it still is), and with the rising price of fuel in the US, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. I arranged a couple of showings, but I had quite a few people…


  • The Book of Redgate: Evidence

    We aren’t the only company that does this, but Redgate Software does try to be data driven. Across my 18 years, I’ve had plenty of people use evidence from customers, from usage data, from market research, and more to justify a decision. I think Google and quite a few other companies have called this being “data-driven.” The text on the next page continues the sentence: not on people’s opinions, the volume of their voices or who they…


  • Never is Not the Policy

    Years ago I worked with a few developers and DBAs that were temp-table happy. As in they defaulted to using temp tables everywhere. This was in SQL Server 6.5, and tempdb was an issue with contention, sizing, and performance. I rewrote so many queries to remove temp tables for our clients that I banned them. I told other developers they could never use temp tables in their SQL code. They, of course, would try to submit code…


  • Accessing the Data API Builder MCP Server from VS Code

    I recently started playing with the MCP Server for SQL Server, which is a part of the Data API Builder (DAB). I’m not sure why there wasn’t a separate piece of technology used, but I do think the DAB server is very useful, and I wish more people used it. Adding MCP to it makes some sense, as the REST and GRAPHQL endpoints can be disabled. This post will look at a few things I did to…


  • Republish: Going Big with SSDs

    Let’s look back. This editorial was originally published on Aug 16, 2011, when SSDs weren’t as common as they are now. Can you even buy hard drives? What do you think about the world 15 years later? I’m at the Fringe Festival with my wife today, so you get to re-read Going Big with SSDs.


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