General

Wow, it’s been a really big year in many ways. I had a list of goals for the year, and overall I’m pretty happy with where it’s ended up. One area that remains a challenge for me is personal health. But there are things I have in place that make me confident that one will be addressed better in 2020. I liked the way that a few of my friends this year posted that they aren’t making New Year resolutions, they’re just stating goals for the next year.

2019-12-31

Hi folks, 2019 has been another really big year. The number of readers of this blog has really increased in the last year and I’m pleased you’re here as one of them. You make it all worthwhile. Thanks to so many who reached out during the year, with wonderful insights and ideas. Just wanted to wish you all the best for the holiday and Christmas season, from here down under.

2019-12-25

Given that SQL is an acronym for Structured Query Language, a reference to “a SQL” is then a reference to a language. Or the term SQL just refers to the language. So something that I find really odd now is the number of people using the word SQL as a synonym for a SQL statement. I keep hearing references like this: We need to execute several SQLs against the server.

2019-12-10

Over the years, I have long periods where I avoid Q&A forums. Lately, I’ve been spending a bit of time back in some forums. And once again, I’ve seen the sorts of behavior that make me think about leaving again. Here’s a simple message: If you don’t like answering questions in Q&A forums, then don’t. Leave. You might think it’s all about you and your attempts to gain reputation in the forums.

2019-10-29

Marketing folk have a few common truisms. One is that it costs way less to keep a customer than it is to find a new one. I have no doubt that’s true. It’s important to keep existing customers. And it costs a lot to get new ones. For many people now, your website will be the first point of contact. By the time that someone visits your website though, a lot of things often have already had to go right.

2019-10-22

When I first saw Grammarly appear, I thought “what a great idea”. I signed up for an account and started using it, and really liked what it did for my writing. It seemed to work well, although it got seriously messed up sometimes. It really didn’t like it when I had a bunch of code on the screen. Overall though, I liked it. But then one of my security-focused friends asked me:

2019-10-15

Knocking Access was a popular sport over the last decade or more. Many data professionals saw Access as a real problem. Lots of silos of unmanaged data grew up across organizations and things could get out of hand pretty quickly. I saw all the expected problems that come from a lack of centralized management of data. Some issues were quite nasty. I remember doing work for a company that did aircraft maintenance and had depots all over the country.

2019-10-08

Recently, one of my MVP colleagues was tweeting about the problems he was having dealing with a country DNS name provider, and how much it cost. I’ve thought this for a long time, but it really does make me wonder if there’s much value left in country-level domain names, at least for companies. The Gold Rush [caption id=“attachment_5623” align=“alignnone” width=“398”] Awesome image by Lucas Benjamin[/caption] Back in the 1990’s, I remember the “gold rush” that happened when people where trying to register domain names for their companies and how intense the competition became.

2019-10-01

I deal with a lot of different service providers, and something that really sets the good ones apart, is their ability to avoid customer issues. Can your staff avoid customer issues? Awesome image by Holger Link Years back, I used to deal with our largest national airline, QANTAS, a lot. They were actually pretty good at helping you out once you had a problem, if you had status with them. What they were extremely poor at, was avoiding issues in the first place.

2019-09-17

I attend a lot of online meetings nowadays, and I can’t tell you how often at meeting that starts at 10 AM actually ends up starting at 10:05 AM or 10:10 AM to cater for people who are running late. Right now I’m in yet another meeting that hasn’t started yet, as we’re just “giving it a few minutes for stragglers to join”. Now it’s a different story if there is a specific person who really is needed in the meeting, and they’ve let you know they are running a few minutes late.

2019-09-10