General

As I work at different client sites, I see a lot of discussion about the cost of cloud-based services, in comparison with on-premises or self-hosted equivalents. One aspect that always seems to be forgotten is opportunity cost.

So many times, I see people comparing raw incremental costs of virtual machines in the different environments. Invariably they aren’t making an apples vs apples comparison. They aren’t considering staff costs, training costs, power, real estate, support costs, etc.

2020-03-12

On our SQL Down Under email list today, someone asked:

My title is DBA but my job is more into SQL Developer, fixing data involved in applications. Do you think if I study Power BI that I can get a better job?

I get asked this sort of question regularly, particularly from traditional DBAs who see their roles disappearing.

The most basic answer is to adapt what you’re doing across to roles that are still in need like data modelling, query performance tuning, DB design in general, etc. However, I wanted to make some more broad recommendations for those considering something more radical.

2020-03-03

Most developers and analysts today are fairly aware of the impacts of technical debt. As technical debt grows, it takes longer and longer to get real customer or end-user work done. Worse, more and more time is spent triaging and squashing bugs. And one interesting aspect of technical debt is old tooling.

Old Tooling

I’ve written before about modern not being a synonym for better, but there comes a point where you need to modernise your tooling, even if it seems to be doing the job.

2020-02-04

I regularly enter passwords into websites, and am told after I’ve entered a new password, that I can’t use any special characters.

Why exactly?

If I see a site that won’t deal with special characters properly, it immediately makes me think there’s some pretty poor coding going on under the covers. Very likely, the developers haven’t thought through how the parsing of requests, etc. should be handled.

It’s not just special characters either. Requiring short passwords is another red flag.

2020-01-21

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. That’s a great way to look at things.

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. It’s not.

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. So it’s really important to keep them once they get there. Why waste all that?

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