So to finish up my look back in 2025, I’ll dig into what I did outside of speaking and writing as my role as Advocate at Redgate. Advocacy, Mentorship, and Community Engagement While speaking and writing, 2025 reaffirmed the importance of advocacy and mentorship. I continued to support professionals navigating career transitions, offered guidance on neurodiversity and sustainability in tech, and contributed to inclusive, community-led events and initiatives reflected in my broader online presence and speaking engagements. I’m still co-organizer for the Data Platform DEI User Group in the Microsoft Community and am ramping up the PDX WIT Meetup in Portland, all while maintaining…
-
-
It’s been a crazy 2025 where I focused on depth over noise, sharing insights on long-term experience and real-world problems. After digging into the post, I ended up breaking this up into two posts to give proper credit to all that happened in 2025. You’re also going to find that rather than chasing shiny AI trends, my work this year centered on helping technologists navigate AI complexity with clarity, especially when data protection was concerned. I did keynotes, technical conferences, published writing, and performed community engagement and all the while the central thread was focused on practical impact: work that…
-
Collaboration has always been one of the hardest parts of my career, and not because people are incapable or unwilling, but more often due to conditions make good collaboration difficult for those challenged with neurodiversity. Remote work, distributed teams, time zones, conflicting priorities, overloaded calendars, along with , personality mismatches, unconscious bias, power dynamics, and differing communication styles all get in the way. Even when everyone has good intent, meaningful collaboration can feel fragile, exhausting, or inaccessible…especially in deeply technical roles where thinking time matters as much as meeting time. Over the years, I’ve learned that the biggest barrier to…
-
The use case: Help Me Learn My New Car As much as folks are lamenting about the new cloud version of Oracle support, I have other issues on my mind- like trying to acclimate to my first electric vehicle, even though I already owned a gas-powered Mini Cooper. As I was looking for a good use case to test new vector search with Oracle 26ai, it occurred to me that I could use something better than a key word search when using the manual to my new car. What if I used the manual, which is public information and could…
-
PostgreSQL’s true power doesn’t just come from its rock-solid relational engine, but it’s the fact that Postgres can grow with you. Extensions allow you to bolt on new capabilities, enhance performance, integrate external tools, and transform the database into something far more powerful than its default installation, which is something I’m really learning to love. From pg_stat_statements to pgvector, logical decoding plugins, job schedulers, and custom procedural languages, Postgres extensions behave like feature packs you can enable at the database level. That also means DBAs must know how to inspect, maintain, and manage them just as carefully as any schema…
-
For anyone who has spent years tuning Oracle redo, the first time you look at PostgreSQL’s pg_stat_wal view may feel a bit underwhelming. Everything works, but the instrumentation isn’t the same and you suddenly realize how much Oracle has spoiled you with it’s advanced and expensive features. As I’ve been working deeper with PostgreSQL, I keep getting questions about how its WAL (Write-Ahead Logging) data compares to Oracle’s redo performance metrics. Let’s break it down in a way that makes sense for people who’ve been living in the Oracle world for years. PostgreSQL and What pg_stat_wal Actually Gives You PostgreSQL…
-
It’s that time of year again when data professionals from every corner of the world are gathering for PASS Data Community Summit and I’m already exhausted…and thrilled to go to Seattle. Between the keynotes, the sessions, and reconnecting with my Summit family, this week always feels like the ultimate data event that I must power through! I start the long week with SQL Saturday Oregon, the weekend before PASS Summit, as I’ll be the keynote speaker at this event and then many of us will head off to Seattle on the SQL Train on Sunday to begin the week of…
-
We organizers just wrapped up the Data Platform DEI Neurodiversity Day, which I helped host while battling a pretty major illness. During two sessions especially, one by James Reeves and another by Itzel Yagual, I had a bit of an epiphany about how my brain works and I thought I’d share. I’ve long known that I’m wired differently as a neurodiverse individual. I give the term multitasking a run for its money, as a professional once described my brain as having 25 McDonald’s drive-thrus, all taking orders at once. My daily goal, as someone with AuDHD, is to manage that…
-
I have the greatest respect for those that organize and create user group tech events. It’s an incredible challenge, especially having to compete with today’s huge, heavily funded, cloud vendor events, and due to this, one of the biggest challenges in running a tech event is driving attendance. The formula is familiar: great speakers, strong technical sessions, networking opportunities, and engaging social events. But somewhere along the way, as technology has advanced, one outdated tactic has lingered: using the presence of young women to attract a male-dominated audience. For women in tech, this is not a trivial issue, but can…
-
Recharging, Exploring, and Sharing Knowledge So My Kevlar Stays Intact The world is always moving fast for me, so it’s easy to overlook the importance of self-care. We often find ourselves caught up in work, deadlines, and the constant drive for productivity. However, taking the time to step away, unplug, and recharge is vital. Not only for my mental and physical well-being but also for my creativity and professional growth. Recently, I had the incredible opportunity to spend a couple of weeks traveling through Europe, exploring the vibrant cities of Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Trieste, and finally, the charming coastal…
-
I just posted on how to use a PowerShell script in a flexible manner to perform different tasks with generative AI locally with Ollama, but I realized I hadn’t gone into just how cool and simple it was to run this on my laptop, along with the beauty of the script output. Pulling from the Demo For the demo scenario, the following exists: A Postgres 17.5 database, source and target for a migration. Four migration scripts requiring code review for the following: Syntax Row Level Security issues inside the database (RLS referenced in the prompt) Missing index options Flyway CLI…
-
When working with database migrations, automation is the key to speed and safety. Redgate Flyway already helps us structure and deploy migrations consistently, but what if we could add AI-powered checks directly into our existing pipelines and do so in a safe manner as well? I’ve been promoting this as part of my open-source and Postgres event sessions for the last few weeks and I’d like to discuss it further. Recently Ollama offered the option for a Windows 11 installation. No GPU or tokens required, (although having GPUs won’t hurt) I did timed tests and found it to be a…
-
Why I Move On, and Why You Might Need To I mentor between three and five individuals at any given time. Many are women, though I mentor men as well. These conversations are always insightful, hopefully for them, not just me, and over time, some clear patterns have emerged. Today, I want to share a few of the tried and true rules I’ve learned and shared as part of these valuable interactions. Why I Leave Roles (and Why You Might Consider It Sooner) Here’s the truth: I have a very low tolerance for leadership foolishness. People sometimes ask, half-jokingly and…
-
After our first two weeks of ensuring Grant and I didn’t burn down SQLServerCentral figuring out how Steve Jones has kept the pace he has for so long, (quite an impressive feat, I think we’d both agree!) I’m back to working with my comparisons and building more knowledge in PostgreSQL. What caught my attention this week was the simple concept of a row (or tuple) which might seem universal in relational systems, after all, data is data no matter the platform, right? But under the hood, the way databases store, manage, and control visibility of that data can differ drastically.…
-
Oracle: Wait Classes & Events As discussed in an earlier blog post, Oracle groups wait events into wait classes like User I/O, System I/O, Concurrency, Network, Idle, Commit, and more. By grouping wait events into categories, it helps the technologist identify where time is being spent in the database, (DB Time) and as there is often a correlation between waits, identifying culprits. This two-tier model (Class → Event) lets you query V$SYSTEM_WAIT_CLASS or V$SYSTEM_EVENT for high-level patterns and drill into specific events, as in the example: “db file sequential read” falls under the wait class User I/O. Class-based stats streamlines…
-
As an Oracle DBA venturing into the world of PostgreSQL, one of the most important areas to get comfortable with is performance tuning. While Oracle’s Cost-Based Optimizer (CBO) is a well-known powerhouse that many DBAs have learned to both respect and wrestle with, PostgreSQL offers its own sophisticated query planner that behaves differently. Understanding these differences is key to becoming proficient with PostgreSQL as we step into tuning. In this post, we’ll explore: The role of pg_stat_statements in query tuning How PostgreSQL’s planner works And how tuning in PostgreSQL compares to the Oracle CBO experience pg_stat_statements the Work Horse Oracle…
-
Now that we finished Part 2 on physical data structures, storage and processes, it’s time to work our way into transaction control, locking and just a smidgen of performance insight. This post is for Oracle DBAs who want to understand PostgreSQL’s transaction and locking mechanics, as well as how to monitor and tune performance without diving into execution plans just yet. Think of this as your quick-reference mental shift guide from Oracle to PostgreSQL. Locking or What is MVCC Without Undo Segments In Oracle, locks and concurrency are managed using undo segments, redo logs, and sophisticated multi-versioning. PostgreSQL also uses…
-
In the previous post, I covered some high-level areas around installation and architecture, but for this post, we’re going to go a little deeper. For the seasoned Oracle DBA, this should feel like we’re stepping into a familiar landscape with just a few different rules. While both PostgreSQL and Oracle Database are robust, feature-rich systems, their physical architecture and internal mechanics diverge in key areas, especially around storage structures, memory architecture, and background processing. In this post, we’ll break down these differences so Oracle DBAs can feel more comfortable with the shift when they transition between the two. Physical Storage:…