I stumbled into a bit of a debate about this where several people were getting a bit heated about where the line is drawn in terms of when and what you denormalize for your systems. Traditionally, when people talk about undoing all of that normalization work you’ve done, they answer with "it depends." It depends on the types of reporting, […]

I had a really interesting conversation with a fellow attendee today at the SQLIntersection/DevIntersection show here in Vegas. We got talking about the cloud. He’d just attended a Cloud Basics session and had come away pretty sure he would never use the cloud for his organization’s applications. I was pretty surprised! Not that I think the cloud is the be-all, […]

Kevin Kline and Sumeet Bansal presented a session talking about a very high volume customer and some lessons-learned regarding working in this environment. The volume was such that the standard things you might think about, from spindles to CPU to RAM just became ineffective. I learned a lot about the physical limitations of hardware (it’s going to be very tough […]

If we continue as we are, just building these really great "crowd-sourced" databases and big data data warehouses, we’ll end up with a bit of the wild-wild-west. I think if just let things happen, they will… and perhaps not in ways that everyone will tolerate. It’s easy to say that we should let things evolve and they’ll turn out OK. […]

I read a great article from Glenn Berry about applying (or not applying) patches to your systems. There are clearly implications of whether you apply updates or not, and Glenn does an excellent job outlining key points. It’s a hard decision only because it can mean some pretty significant work on your part to make sure updates are clean and […]

Big Data is so many things to so many people. To the boss, it’s predictive information. To database professionals, it’s a lot of things together – velocity, volume, all those things that have come to define it officially. More and more I see projects struggling because the chasm between what one group defines it as vs what another defines it […]

Traditional suggestions for running your systems included modeling your disk usage and other resources so you can predict your system growth, utilization and overall requirements as time goes on. I’ve been working with a couple of systems for just this type of profiling. It’s been interesting to see that the traditional model of "we’ve grown at this rate before, we […]

Access and Foxpro Moving to Azure I was surprised to hear late last week that Microsoft’s Access and FoxPro lines are being migrated to Azure offerings, much like the HDInsight and various database and database offerings from Microsoft. I initially had a hard time understanding the "Why" of the change, but it does make sense. If you think about how […]

So, Exactly What IS Personally Identifiable Information? I think it’s clear that things are changing. There was an article and project several years back to determine whether you could figure out who someone was by their search terms. Google had published a scrubbed listing of search terms with no (at the time) personally identifiable information. The purpose was to start […]

More on Personally Identifiable Information, PII Some great feedback from Ian yesterday – "Understanding what constitutes personally identifiable information becomes even more important when considering cloud computing. Not only do you have to consider what is being stored, but it is highly likely that you will be legally bound to consider in which jurisdiction it is stored. This includes not […]