I was caught off guard last week when the “Congratulations on your work anniversary!” messages started rolling in on LinkedIn. It had slipped my mind that it had already been a full year since I began contracting with Redgate back in May 2024. And, true to form, LinkedIn, always eager to simplify the complexities of tech careers and notified my entire network that I’d officially hit the one-year mark, although I hadn’t started full-time till the beginning of October. It can almost feel like an identity crisis as you perform so many roles for different organizations – thrilling and satisfying…
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When building products that interact with multiple database platforms, the complexity can be both a challenge and an opportunity. For Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), observing design decisions made without sufficient knowledge of underlying database architecture can be particularly frustrating. These moments highlight the critical need for architectural foresight and platform-specific expertise to avoid pitfalls that compromise scalability, performance, and maintainability. I’ve been managing multiple platforms for a couple decades and in recent years, building products that support the most popular enterprise and open-source databases today. I’m keenly aware of lacking documentation, either due to limited resources or hopes of directing…
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I just finished an interview with a friend for a blog post where he was surprised how differently I was viewed in the Oracle community, (a multi-platform DBA who wasn’t very loyal to Oracle like she should be) vs. the Microsoft community, (that odd Oracle girl.) The truth is, I’ve always enjoyed database technology and few know that my first database (MSSQL 6.5) as well as my first book was in Microsoft SQL Server (Pro SQL Server 2012 Practices). I’m not platform centric at all, work mostly in Oracle, SQL Server/Azure SQL and MySQL, but I’m just CUSTOMER centric. Azure…
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With my upcoming session on “Migrating Oracle Workloads to Azure IaaS” this week at PASS Virtual Summit 2020, I wanted to take some time to dig deeper onto the performance side. The last thing you want to have happen is to migrate your database to the cloud and have it just screech to a halt. The truth is, its often a combination of database and infrastructure issues that are the cause. Although many of you may want me to dig into database performance data, I’m actually going to first focus on infrastructure, as it’s the area that most aren’t privy…
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When I arrived at Microsoft, I knew I would hopefully get to use my Linux skills for more than teaching SQL Server DBAs about Linux and was pleasantly surprised as I began working in Azure to find that, of course, it’s ALL LINUX. After almost six months at the company and coming into the Christmas week, I’m thankful for all the technology I’m working with and what many assume that Microsoft won’t be about- the command line. Azure All the Time As much as I feel GUIs are necessary, I’m happiest at the command line and recommend to all those…
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There’s something for having job security and many of the solutions that I see offered for RDBMS challenges offer just that. With compliance with EU’s GDPR, (General Data Protection Regulations) just around the corner, (mark you calendar, May 25, 2018) you’d think we’d all be scrambling for a simpler solution to discovering and addressing all that GDPR data. Quick refresher for those of you going, “What is GDPR?” Data security is a known focus of GDPR when you talk to folks, but it’s much more than just security. It’s about extended rights of the individual in the EU. There’s four…
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So where did 2017 go?!?!? I really, really would like to know… Needless to say, it’s time to do a year in review already and I actually have time to do it this year! DBAKevlar Blog I wrote over 100 blog posts this year between DBAKevlar, Delphix and partner sites, but I’ve enjoyed sharing with the different communities. There’s significant changes going on in the IT world regarding the future of the Database Administrator. This deafening message came through when pulling together my top blog posts for 2017, with Death of the DBA, Long Live the DBA presenting itself as…
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So this week I’m back on the other coast, Raleigh, NC at ECO17 after last week in Seattle. I’ve switched from SQL Server to Oracle and we won’t discuss how many times I had to correct myself as I said, “transaction log” instead of “archive log” and pointed west instead of east for the ocean…My expression at times was similar to Obi Wan’s- For the next month, I’ll be sticking to the Oracle side, as this is going to be a crazy month for travel. My two sessions at ECO this week were well attended and I really enjoyed talking…
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The network has often been viewed as “no man’s land” for the DBA- Our tools may identify network latency, but rarely does it go into any details, designating the network outside our jurisdiction. As we work through data gravity, i.e. the weight of data, the pull of applications, services, etc. to data sources, we have to inspect what connects it to the data and slows it down. Yes, the network. We can’t begin to investigate the network without spending some time on Shannon’s law, also known as Shannon-Hartley Theorem. The equation relates to the maximum capacity (transmission bit rate) that…
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There was a great post by Noel Yuhanna on how he deems the number of DBAs required in a database environment by size and number of databases. This challenge has created a situation where data platforms are searching for ways to remove this roadblock and eliminate the skills needed to manage the database tier. I’ve been a DBA for almost 2 decades now, (“officially” as my beginning date with an official title and my years experience differ by a couple years…) When I started, we commonly used import and export features to move data from one data source to another.…
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I’m in sunny Phoenix this week at the Data Platforms 2017 Conference and looking forward to a break in the heat when I return to Colorado this evening. As this event is for big data, I expected to present on how big data could benefit from virtualization, but was surprised to find that I didn’t have a lot of luck finding customers utilizing us for this reason, (yet). As I’ve discussed in previous presentations, I was aware of what a “swiss army knife” virtualization is, resolving numerous issues, across a myriad of environments, yet often unidentified. The Use Case To…
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I did a couple great sessions yesterday for the awesome Dallas Oracle User Group, (DOUG.) It was the first time I did my thought leadership piece on Making Sense of the Cloud and it was a great talk, with some incredible questions from the DOUG attendees! This points me to a great [older] post on things IT can do to help guarantee tech projects are more successful. DevOps is a standard in most modern IT shops and DBAs are expected to find ways to be part of this valuable solution. If you inspect the graph, displaying the value of different projects…
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I love valuable metric data and I wanted to see what’s offered from different cloud providers. Metrics are data and data ensures that when performance is impacted, we have the information we need to answer questions and resolve issues. For my first adventure, we’ll start with a high level review of Amazon. Cloudwatch is one of the main tools to inspect the workload on instances in EC2, using the AWS Trial while Swingbench runs the Sales History workload. There is additional charges for this feature, but it’s pretty minimal per instance vs. other tools, so I’ll talk about the basics…
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Swingbench is a one of the best choices for easy loads on a database. I wanted to use it against the SH sample schema I loaded into my Oracle Source database and I haven’t used Swingbench outside of the command line quite a while back, (my databases seem to always come with a load on them!) so it was time to update my Swingbench skills and catch up with the user interface. Thanks to Dominic Giles for keeping the download, features and documentation so well maintained. After adding the application rights to run on my Macbook Pro, I was impressed by…
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Most people know I like to do things the hard way… 🙂 When it comes to learning things, there’s often no better way to get a strong understanding than to have to take something apart and put it back together. I wanted to use swingbench on my AWS deployment and needed the Sales History, (SH) sample schema. I don’t have an interface to perform the installation via the configuration manager, so I was going to install it manually. Surprise, the scripts in the $ORACLE_HOME/demo/schema/sh directory were missing. There are a couple options to solve this dilemma. Mine was to first get the…
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There are a lot of people and companies starting to push the same old myth regarding the death of the database administrator role in companies. On the Oracle side, it started with release Oracle 7 and now is proposed with the introduction of cloud. Hopefully my post will help ease the mind of those out there with concerns. There are a number of OBVIOUS reasons this is simply not true, but I’m going to write a few posts over the next year on some of the less obvious ones that will ensure DBAs stay employed for the long haul. The…
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No, this isn’t a title for a future Star Wars movie, but our own future, foreseen by me, (as well as many others) from experience, research and discussions everyday. No, it’s not this dark and menacing…no sith lords. The Cloud We know who the main players in the current cloud arena are and how much they hold of the cloud market. Many are betting that they can make a dent in that market and as much as it looks like some companies have the cloud all “wrapped up”, it may not be as clean a win as you might think. One to…
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I don’t want to alarm you, but there’s a new Delphix trial on AWS! It uses your own AWS account and with a simple set up, allows you to deploy a trial Delphix environment. Yes, you hear me right- just with a couple steps, you could have your own setup to work with Delphix! There’s documentation to make it simple to deploy, simple to understand and then use cases for individuals determined by their focus, (IT Architect, Developer, Database Administrator, etc.) This was a huge undertaking and I’m incredibly proud of Delphix to be offering this to the community! So…