It’s incredible to me when you sit and watch the injection attempts against your public web properties. I realize that most are bot-oriented attempts, that there aren’t people sitting at the other end of most of those connections (no one types that stuff in, give me a break)… but still, someone felt that was a better use of their time […]
Azure
Beware the Complacency of “It just works”
For awhile now, things have been getting very stable, very reliable and the workloads of managing data are even beginning to split. Some of the management is being done by outside folks, some by automated processes and, overall, things run extremely well. It’s led to a bit of a strange trend in systems we’ve been reviewing. “Strange” because it seems […]
Interesting: Data Bread Lines
In reading through a post about a book that’s out about managing and living with data, there were some very interesting observations outlined. Things that are pretty apparent as you work through systems at companies with many different sources of information and raw data. The post was a book excerpt, from “Winning With Data” (Wiley). If you think about it, […]
SQL Server RAT in the mix.
The creativity of some hackers and malicious actors is just amazing. There is a new bit of malware out there now that highlights some new approaches that I think we’ll start to see more of, and at the same time, incorporates SQL Server, which (at least since some infamous older issues) hasn’t been the specific key component of issues for […]
SQL Server instance growth, management
I was reading an interesting article in DBTA (April/May 2018, “The Headaches of Microsoft SQL Server Sprawl“) and it was clear that so many of us are facing some pretty significant challenges when it comes to managing SQL Server instances. Particularly true if you consider “SQL Server instances” to include your Azure instances and/or managed instances on Azure and AWS. […]
How Do You Select Your Next Database Engine?
There are many choices for your next database project. Of course it depends somewhat on the types of information you’re working with, and the types of functionality you require. In addition, up-time requirements will likely come into play. But what if so many of the different access methods you have today were possible and you could pick the engine behind […]
Planning that next platform upgrade or migration
Completing a migration, whether it’s for version-to-version migration or for platform updates or even moving to a cloud-based solution from an on-premises solution, is a major project. Even a sideways version swap, accompanied by a platform change can mean all sorts of things in terms of settings, features, capabilities that may have to be modified, for sure have to be […]
Beware the dark side of capacity
When you’re working with resources that are dedicated instances, powerful instances, you can get caught up a bit in the fact that it can take a lot more to trip up those resources than perhaps you’re used to. It’s sort of like flying as the only passenger in an airplane made for commercial flight; there is likely a lot more […]
Using Throw-Away Databases, Tables
We’ve been doing some work with a few different database systems that are supported on the different cloud platforms – work where we’re using the databases as either a pre-processing or holding-zone for data that isn’t quite yet ready to be fed into the overall scheme of things for the customers. It was an odd realization that with many of […]
Data Architecture Challenge – “Active Archives”
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 […]