Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Donating for a little kid

    One of my authors sent me this note:

    “

    I know you only know me as a writer for SQLServerCentral, but I have a friend whose son is really bad. He is at the hospital and the cannot pay it. It is very expensive. The family is desesperate. They live in Bolivia.

    I am collecting some money for the Family. The sickness is: multiple sclerosis or disseminated sclerosis.

    If you would like to donate: http://cuentitosdeltio.blogspot.com/2013/04/donacion-alejandro.html

    I created a form in one of my blogs to receive donations. 10 $us or whatever donation is welcome.

    Thanks for reading this email
    “

    I doubled the author’s payment out of my account and donated. If you feel like doing so, please feel free to participate. If not, please think about others in your life that might benefit from some charity and give back to the world when you can.

  • Microsoft Research

    Microsoft is investing heavily in research.
    Microsoft is investing heavily in research.

    I’ve always thought that the idea of investing in research products was a good one in many industries. Some of the companies that were very successful across the last hundred years were those that invested in learning about the technologies and processes in their industries. From these ideas and inventions, engineers have built the products that companies sell and which enrich our lives. Government and academia have also helped fuel the advance of technology in America, but it takes business interests to provide the practical implementations of innovations that can be bought and sold.

    There are people that think corporations like Microsoft and Google should focus on their core businesses and maximize their profits. However I think the investments that these companies make in various research areas allow them to learn about new opportunities that may become products at some point. It can be hard to determine if a technology area is viable for products, and the targeted research these companies engage in can help them improve existing products, or invent new ones.

    I think that having research areas enables diverse opportunities that may help attract, or retain, some extremely talented employees. I know I’d love the chance to take a sabbatical for a year and work on a research project of some sort. The top talent at many large companies may want to work in a theoretical area for a period of time, and companies may find very talented academics that might want to try working on more practical endeavors.

    I was watching this keynote from Microsoft Research and it was amazing to me how much of an effort Microsoft is putting into their research. They claim they are the number one organization doing basic research in computer science. They publish more research, and funding more graduates student hours of work than any other single institution. Considering how large some universities are, this quite a commitment to research. It’s one that I hope they continue in the years to come.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Fun at SQL Bits

    Last week was the eleventh SQL Bits conference and it was a fun time in Nottingham. I traveled over to the Red Gate offices for a few days before driving to Nottingham for the event. This is my second SQL Bits and it’s one of my favorite conferences. It’s a little bigger than most SQL Saturdays, with more amenities, but it’s a low cost and it retains the charm, casual atmosphere and fun that many of the larger events have lost. Spouses and children typically have little problem attending with the data professionals, and the less formal proceedings seem to make this as much of a social event as a professional one.

    The format is a little different from many events in that there are paid days (a nominal fee for a conference event) and a free day. You can attend part of all of the conference, and all of the sessions are filmed and available online. The event moves around the UK, and I’ve been to the Liverpool, and now, Nottingham, events. The East Mindlands Conference Center was a very nice facility, nice conference rooms and facilities, one of the better venues I’ve seen. The highlight of the event was the Friday night social, with a medieval theme. It was very surprising how many people participated.  I had expected the organizers to dress up:

     

    20130503-DSC07175

    However I was surprised to see many others, including the Red Gate staff

    20130503-DSC07208

     

    And dozens of others. As I was leaving the Red Gate office on Thursday, someone gave me a bag and told me to wear it. I hadn’t checked it until Friday afternoon, and I was a good sport in just putting it on.

    fpwll

    I had fun walking around throughout the evening, seeing the various costumes, some of which were amazing. The Lego costume was really stunning. I’m not even sure how I’d make that one. I haven’t seen a picture yet (and forgot to take one), but it was incredible.

    You can see more pictures here or check out the Facebook page.

    I delivered my Searching Binary Data talk, and it went well (I think). I also attended Matijah Lah‘s talk on semantic statistics and learned a few things. I saw an amazing advanced DR/HA talk from Christian Bolton, and a few more interesting sessions. I also marked a few more to watch later.

    I love most events, but typically the smaller ones, however I am looking forward to the chance to come back.

     

  • State of the Cloud

    The Azure cloud is doing well.
    The Azure cloud is doing well.

    Microsoft has joined the billion dollar club. For Azure, that is. They announced that this platform and service will generate a billion dollars in revenue. It’s been growing, and at least one analyst expects the revenue to double annually. Profit is something else, but I know from various people at Microsoft that they are working hard and investing heavily in this service, and I’m sure at some point it will be profitable, though I’m not sure how much.

    Amazon has had a very successful AWS platform, providing a wide variety of services and products. Their aim is to go for the high volume, low margin business, which makes their service competitive with the costs of buying and managing your own hardware. As long as Amazon and other competitors are out there, I suspect cloud services will be cheap enough to make many companies consider moving some of their infrastructure to this type of environment. It certainly eases the time and effort of building new machines and encourages better development habits.

    As IT departments, especially the management of those groups consider using cloud type services, they still have to be aware that this isn’t a savings that comes for free. Code changes, staffing skill growth and mindset evolutions to take into the account the challenges of working in a cloud environment, as well as the SLAs that seem to favor the cloud providers more than the cloud customers, mean this isn’t an easy decision. Add to this the potential tax implications, and the decision to move away from current IT practices is not always obvious.

    The idea of cloud computing, and cloud services, is still very immature. From the definition of what this means, to the offerings, to the architectures, the industry has a lot of growth to do before most of us will feel comfortable moving substantial parts of our infrastructure out of our own facilities.