If the email I am receiving is any indication of what is happening around databases is true, here are some of the hot skills. DevOps Simplified Database Change Management Services in the Cloud On Site and Cloud combined implementations…especially SQL Server BI of any type Machine Learning If you’re like me, you get a lot of Email daily, and it […]

I was talking with someone today that was under the impression that backups and restores were a thing of the past. Yikes. I never really anticipated someone feeling that way. Their systems are largely on-premise but they do use the cloud for some bigger workloads, storage and such. Their feeling was that things were so stable any more, and that […]

What is your key management process? When it comes to encryption, encryption key management is probably the most important part. It is more important than what encryption methodology you use. The encryption key is the backbone to all encryption, regardless of using a salt, or anything else. There are a few key aspects of a key management process that you […]

Even one of the comments from yesterday said it – “I don’t know where to start…” – boy, isn’t THAT the truth? Talking about what to learn, what priorities to pay attention to, where to start learning all of it. That’s the problem. The “all of it” part. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to that are […]

The talk of the pending demise of the DBA (not) leads us to, “OK then, how do we keep up??!” I know for me, and for those I work with, this has been one of the single biggest topics of discussion when it comes to professional life. Things are moving fast (no kidding) and going very broad. I think we’ve […]

I think I need to clarify some terms when it comes to monitoring your systems. I find there may be two different kinds of monitoring. Monitoring for your system is coming down. User activities are very slow, or dropped on the floor Monitoring the continuous operations of your ENTIRE system, from the users perspective There are great tools, as David […]

Have you had a chance to look at the Query Data Store introduced in SQL Server 2014. This is a great, out of the box, monitoring tool when it comes to query execution plans. The execution plan for a query may change over time due to different factors. When available memory is stressed, SQL Server will release cached query plans […]

I can’t think of many conversations I’ve had with those considering new versions of database software and/or cloud that haven’t included “…and we won’t need DBAs??” This has been true of moving to new releases of SQL Server, and new functionality in the cloud or even working up hybrid solutions. Egad. I was reading this post on Network World that […]

When you want to know about performance of your application, you need to base the performance on the overall experience of the consumer. That means you must include all the time from the request being sent from the client until the response has been returned. Depending on your system, there may be many different process interactions, maybe on different servers […]