Voice of the DBA

Throughout my career I've been looking to consolidate SQL Servers when I find them. The typical employer I've had usually grows their IT infrastructure over time and many projects look like this: Build or buy a software package Buy a new server Install SQL Server and one database for the application Over time this means I find lots of individual servers running at much less than full capacity. That's something that DBAs like, because it means that we can handle the inevitable spikes in resource

A friend recently was asked to give a presentation on their career to a group of 12 year olds. It was a challenge to engage the students, and my friend was surprised that very few of the kids were interested in technology. I was disappointed as well since I think this is a great career choice, and worth a little investigation, especially at that age. It's hard to convince people to enter this business if they don't have any interest, but if they do, I'm wondering what you might tell them. Today I'd

This is what you build to juggle 6,000 tweets a second. That's the headline that caught my eye and it's about the challenges of Twitter and the data that they handle. Twitter definitely has a tough problem, one that few of us have, but perhaps they can help us learn to better deal with our own data from their experiences on an edge case. The story is journalistic, not so technical, but it is interesting. Twitter has struggled with a blend of data that is partially crucial and must be consistent now

It's 2014. SQL Server 2000 is 14 years old, but there are still quite of you managing instances. SQL Server 2005 is 9 years old, and I'm sure more of you still deal with that version. I know because I work for a software vendor and I'm constantly asked if our software will run against those two versions of SQL Server. For many of you, however, if you're managing a SQL Server 2000 instance, it might only be 9 or 10 years old. Your company might still have been installing SQL Server 2000 in the year

I saw this post recently about security and preparing for a data breach. The title caught my eye because it implies that we're all doomed. Do the rest of you think that? Is it a question of when we'll have a security breach not if? Given the headlines, the news we find out about companies not disclosing security issues, the back doors and poor code in much software, is it any wonder that people think it's a "when" and not an "if"? Given the lack of realization from many companies that suffer

Big Data is constantly in the news. We've been asked at SQLserverCentral to try and develop some articles, perhaps even a stairway to explain what Big Data is and how we might use it. I'm still trying to grasp the concepts myself, and unlike the amorphous cloud, I'm still looking for some good examples of what Big Data really is. When I ran across this piece warning that Big Data isn't the final solution to all our questions in the world, I wasn't surprised. The piece notes that Google Flu hasn't

The Connect system from Microsoft doesn't work that well, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to press Microsoft for change. Read the rest of "Lobbying for Change" at SQLServerCentral.