DBAs are all about transparency – transparency hopefully about what’s going on with the SQL server. Things like connections and utilization and all of that. You have many standard tools that monitor and analyze your SQL Server, but you also have access to other tools native to the AWS platform. It’s surprising the granularity you can drop down into […]
Editorials
Design is Critical for Your Systems
The (now) age-old question of “are DBAs going away” is something that’s been beaten up here and other places. One of the first things that usually puts this to rest is the discussion of design. It’s a little strange to watch the pendulum swing back and forth – disk became really inexpensive and people stopped worrying about storage; servers became […]
Amazon RDS SQL Server – (A few of) the lessons learned
With some interesting experiences under our collective belts when it comes to working with SQL Server on AWS, it seems like it might be interesting to share some of the things we’ve learned and seen in the field. AWS’ RDS with SQL Server is a great SaaS deployment of SQL Server that gives you the benefit of the fully-managed environment […]
GDPR Doesn’t Mean Useless Data
A huge challenge with data systems right now is “OK, great. So I have to do all of these things to comply with the GDPR and other privacy laws that are out there now (or will be soon, surely), but I have a conflicting obligation to provide useful information to my company, what do I do?” Depending on your company, […]
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 […]
Storage Space Costs are Skyrocketing…
At a time when you can have nearly unlimited storage in the cloud, when you can purchase disk space and storage options for pennies on the dollar of what it used to cost, you may consider that the statement that the costs are skyrocketing is, well, silly. The acquisition costs are indeed lower. But the risks and management and administrative […]
You and I, we have a reputation problem…
I’ve been talking to all sorts of folks about speaking for the upcoming virtual conference – and we’ll have a heck of a roster, to be sure. But the thing is, there is a weird pattern emerging. When it comes to talking with people that are deep in the security space, and we’re talking about possible topics, they’re genuinely surprised […]