Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Breaking Rules in Rome

    Last week I was honored with a trip to Rome for the Redgate President’s Club. I was awarded this, along with our top people in Sales, for the work I did in 2025. It was a fun trip, but as we prepared to depart Cambridge, one of the rules our Chief Revenue Officer gave us was:

    Don’t work this week

    She told us that the company should be able to survive a week without us. On Wednesday, I got reminded of this when I replied to a few Slack messages.

    Thursday I got reminded again.

    By Friday she had given up.

    It’s not that I don’t want to get away from work, or don’t, but there are things that come up and can be easily dealt with. In both cases, I had people ping me about things that are happening this week (18May) or in two weeks (1 Jun), and I need to ensure I’m prepped. I also had responses on a couple of SQL Server Central tickets, that I needed to provide a few details on.

    These were small things, and I wasn’t checking email or most Slack messages, only a few channels where I knew there would be some relevant activity. I also scanned email looking for only ticket responses so I could provide info if needed.

    Sometimes work takes priority over other things. I’ve had to handle a few things on sabbaticals. I’ve had to respond on vacation for certain things. In general I tell people to leave me alone, and they do for the most part.

    I’m not upset, and it’s the price of being successful and involved. Finding this balance is important, and it’s easy to work too much, or too little. I feel I’ve got a pretty good balance when I go on vacation, minimizing interruptions, though certainly not eliminating them.

    That being said, I did have a good time. Not sure why I’m not smiling, but the Colosseum was amazing.

    20260515_182019

  • T-SQL Tuesday #198–Change Detection

    This month we have a new host, Meagan Longoria, who graciously agreed to help me this month. I’ve known Meagan for a number of years and she’s been a person whom I’ve asked questions about data visualization and analysis in the past. I was slightly surprised by the topic this month, but only slightly. I’ll write my answer below, but if you want to try blogging and host a future month, let me know.

    Change Detection

    The topic this month is change detection, which is important for efficient ETL work, but also for other areas, such as auditing. I haven’t tended to work in high volume systems where we did a lot of ETL and needed to very efficiently detect changes. Most of the time I’ve had ETL pipelines they were busy, but not excessively so.

    As a result, in the past, I’ve often used a roll-your-own approach in the SQL 6.5->2008 era. As I’ve worked on those systems, we’ve usually used a simple update or modified date in the table that tracked when something was altered. By knowing the last time a pipeline ran, we could gather all data from that point forward and extract it.

    We used a similar approach to send a lot of emails from SQL Server Central years ago. That can work well, and as long as you track the last execution of your pipeline process, whatever that is, you minimize the data being transferred.

    A Modern Approach

    I ran into dbt a few years ago and did a one day class on how it works. It was interesting to me, and I could see the appeal. Recently I had a conversation with John Miner, who’s used it in his Fabric Modern Data Platform series. I would be very tempted to use dbt, in conjunction with a modified date as described above, to ETL data around today.

    However.

    I have been seeing that Change Data Capture (CDC) is being used by lots of products these days. It’s behind the Fabric mirroring, Oracle has used it for years, when you look to move data into Databricks, CDC is common, it seems like it’s everywhere. 

    If I were going to be regularly moving data in 2026, CDC seems like something I’d experiment with and test, since it’s a known technology that works across many platforms and there is a lot of knowledge out there on how it works. AI can certainly help with experiments, and with understanding the overhead on your system, because there is some overhead.

    I haven’t looked at the new Change Event Streaming, though I’m always wary of anything that limits me to one cloud. The more generic CDC, with AI assisted configuration and maintenance, seems like a better approach.

  • Redgate and Rome

    I’m at the UK Redgate office today, meeting with senior leaders in all areas of the business. I was honored to be awarded a spot in our President’s Club. This is where the top performing sales people get to meet with leaders in the company and then head off for a few days of relaxation and excitement.

    I’m here today and tomorrow and then off to Rome. We’re heading to tour the city, see the Vatican, and visit some great restaurants. I’m excited for the trip and I’ll have a few photos and thoughts next week, but I’m off this week.

    Hopefully it’s a quiet one for you.

  • A New Word: the Kinder Surprise

    the kinder surprise – . the point in your early adolescence when you realize that your parents are muddling through their lives the same as you; that many respectable adults are not less lost than you and your friends, no less petty and obsessive and insecure, which makes you wonder if there are no real adults, because such a thing never actually existed, except in bedtime stories.

    I am not an adolescent, but I realized this early in my career, while working with some other technologists that I expected to know a lot more than I did and be more aware of things they should do to either advance their careers or improve their skills.

    Over the last ten years, more and more I find that most people aren’t really strong, self-confident adults in all aspects of their lives. They might be at home, or at work, or on a sports field, or while playing an instrument, but in some of those areas they are insecure.

    Or lost, or obsessive, or anything else.

    I’ve tried hard to be honest with my kids as they were growing up, letting them know I’m fallible and unsure sometimes. At the same time, I try to help them develop confidence and show when I have that.

    And explain that confidence isn’t’ arrogance. Being confident doesn’t mean I’m sure I’m right about something, but rather I know the pros/cons and what this means in my life. What effects my decisions have and I choose to make them, knowing there is both an upside and downside.

    Few people have figured out most of their life. Many might have figured out little and aren’t really that much different from a teenager.

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows