A quick check of the news and posts about what people (particularly municipalities) are doing or planning for databases will show that there are indeed big plans. From better gun purchase background checks to military participation in adding names to watch lists for criminal activity to gang affiliations and much, much more One of these that was a little surprising […]
Editorials
How Did You Learn About That?
Do you have a great tip or idea or passion for working with data? Do you have a product or service that you’d like the world to know about? Free? We’re off and running for the SSWUG Virtual Conference for May and I wanted to ask; how did you learn that really cool trick, technique or approach when working with […]
Is Cloud Storage the New USB Key?
There’s been a disturbing trend in several security incidents of late where people lose control of bits of information that are, essentially, left lying around. This happens with storage in the cloud – you set up a quick container on the service of choice, push a copy of your files to the storage area… “just for the time being” and […]
Surprises to Consider for (Cloud) Integration
All of this talk about considerations for moving your database to a new SQL Server (be it the cloud or on-premises) brings up a number of questions about your systems, how they’re set up and running and what types of things you need from a potential update to the infrastructure. There are many outlier type situations that, while they’re critical […]
When Is Your Database Ready to Consider the Cloud?
I read an interesting post about moving your database to the cloud (or, rather, hybrid cloud) and was surprised about the elements the writer chose to determine whether your database is a candidate for that type of infrastructure. (Here’s a link to the post) It’s hard to determine just what elements are most critical to considering a move to the […]
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 […]
Search Skills and Approaches for SQL Server (and other platforms)
One of the things that I suspect many companies are working through is the issue of information. As in, too much of a good thing makes it harder to get the good stuff out of the good thing. If there’s any trend that’s apparent on content sites like the (traditionally magazine) article sites and even internal databases that have information […]
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 […]
Sometimes, You Have to Play Fireman
I’ve been working with several people as they re-architect their SQL Server systems to use their hybrid or cloud-first providers for their systems. In each case of this example, they’re currently entirely on-premises with their systems and are moving to the other types of platforms. What’s odd, at least to me, is that one of the reasons for the move […]