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 […]
Azure
Handling Downtime and the Cloud
Yes, it happens. Things happen, systems fail, someone trips over a cable (hopefully not so much these days in major data centers), etc. What has struck me though is that your options for dealing with downtime when you’re hosting (and it doesn’t matter if it’s “stretch” services or hybrid or entirely cloud) in these types of services, are limited. If […]
False Sense of Security from Vendor
There’s been an interesting trend lately in several different sales calls where you’re walking through the software capabilities, listing out the different goals you have for the project, etc. The customer (be they internal or external) eventually gets around to infrastructure and how you’ve architected the solution. Now, if it’s on-premise, this leads to a lengthy discussion (why is it […]
The Cloud Does, Indeed, Not Fix Everything
Yesterday the post was about possibly using a move of servers to help ferret out things to review in your architecture (and not using it as a chance to necessarily block access that may have been lost control of). There was a good point made in the comments – John said “Those DTUs will kill your wallet if you don’t […]
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 […]
What Do You See for 2018?
The end of the year (I’m not rushing it, just getting ahead of the curve to get your early thoughts), is when people start thinking through what’s coming up and what to expect. I’m curious what you would see as the top 3 things or so that you’d expect to see happening in the data space in 2018. Drop them […]
Vendor Lock-In Challenges
I have to admit, I approached the whole question yesterday quite differently that everyone else. I was worried more about new standards, development trajectories, compatibility and so-on. When I wrote about the vendor-specific database flavors… I missed what could certainly be the larger issue. John Shadows wrote: 100% cloud also means you have to play by the cloud rules all […]
Would You Use a Provider DB Engine?
Perhaps one of the odder questions I’ve asked. For example, would you use a Microsoft-branded tweaked database platform? Would you use an Amazon-branded, or Google-branded of the same? The major players seem to see these as the way forward, and I have to admit it has me both intrigued and baffled. A strange combination for sure. With Microsoft, it’s Cosmos […]
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 […]