Perhaps one of the biggest challenges that we’re all working through right now is working with the volumes of data on hand, and maintaining it in a usable way. We’ve been working with a couple of different clients to create ways to either use some of Azure’s Elastic Database approach, or move different information bits to different systems that would […]
Administration
Critical Data Recovery is Multi-Faceted
Yesterday, the post was about cyber-attack recovery. Talking about the need for a more comprehensive recovery mechanism and approach than just “restore to the most recent backup.” As mentioned, this also applies to failover systems. In many cases, people will put in failover systems (or cloud-based services that are highly unlikely to go down) and figure they’re covered. But the […]
Cyber-Attack Recovery – Are You Ready?
Many times when folks are planning for recovery of a system, it’s because they anticipate that the system will crash or will be unavailable in a fairly traditional way. (Is there a traditional way for a system to crash???) However, as I was reading a post about the premise that the “Majority of banks [are] still vulnerable to cyber attacks” […]
Surprise! Data Folks Will Have to Drive GDPR/Privacy Protections
We work with a product line that produces online event for companies (bear with me, this isn’t an ad). This is for webinars, virtual conferences, etc. The goal of nearly every one of these events is to gather information about your attendees to be able to better serve them by knowing what they’re most interested in. So, to that end, […]
Love/Hate Relationship with Unstructured Data
No doubt you’ve seen, and perhaps been working with unstructured solutions out there – DynamoDB, Azure Table Storage, and there are many other options as well. It’s pretty cool that you can define key/value pairs and just start dumping information into the system, really without regard to structure and columns and many of the things that have traditionally made up […]
When The Flu = Better DB Practices
Like too many of us, I’ve been fighting a nasty bout of the cold or flu or whatever it is that’s going around. And while I’ve been enjoying (!) the exhaustion and inability to think straight actually got me thinking about the many things that keep systems running so you’re not on the hook 24/7. One of the things that […]
Are VMs the Gateway Drug to the Cloud?
As I was reading through various comments today on the site, and going yesterday’s post, I noticed an interesting comment: Relinquishing time-honored onprem tactics maybe forced upon us by the volume and cost of moving that volume in the cloud. For some reason, this really struck a thoughtful chord with me. It’s very true – the “cost” of moving to […]
Spring (er, Fall) Cleaning For Your System
Recently, we’ve been going through our systems in anticipation of a move to a new SQL Server environment. Partly because of the version upgrade, partly because it seemed originally like the right thing to do. Now, after we’ve been starting to investigate further the process of figuring out the unused items, and the breadth of the issue, it seems even […]
Managing Your On and Off-Premise Infrastructure
Increasingly, as we’re working with people to help out with infrastructure and with setup and considerations for their servers and solutions (wow, that’s a long breath), the trend is about handing off to cloud providers… That’s all well and good, but there’s a bit a devil in the details, so to speak. One of the things that seems to be […]
How Do You Keep Up With Releases?
A bit ago, Microsoft changed their methodology for development and release of software. They took a fairly big hit in getting things out as they moved from what I’d call a “version” oriented release, where you cram everything possible in to a release version, to more of a scheduled release where things are in the release that are “right” and […]