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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Please join me, Kendra Little and Grant Fritchey on February 12th for an awesome webinar to discuss the results from the 4th annual Redgate State of Database DevOps report. We’ll discuss the interesting insights it provides and the future of Database DevOps! You can read the here: Actual Report
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DevOps deployments and automation have numerous tools at their disposal, but most often, scripting is required. Although I’m a Microsoft Azure fanatic, I am also a strong advocate of Linux and with my two decades on Unix, I strongly prefer BASH over PoSH. I find the maturity of BASH and KSH highly attractive over PoSH and with my experience, I’m simply more skilled with shells native to the Linux OS. Before we get too far in, I know some of the text can be difficult to read and/or you want to copy and paste or you want some of the…
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I’ve been hesitant to post too much on my blog until since the hack, as there were some residual issues after the restoration of the site that took a bit to correct. I’m finally feeling confident enough to start posting on everything I’m doing currently working with Azure and the education customers for Microsoft. One of the powerful tools I’ve been taking advantage of is the Azure Cloud Shell. This cloud tool has the offering option of setting to PowerShell or Bash and I think you know which I chose. Although everything I do will require a PowerShell version in…
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The I’ve been busy automating a solution we provide many of our Education customers that I discovered, due to a variety of technical skills, was hindered on using the solution while spending significant time deploying it. New to Azure, I wanted to use templates with a bash script as my first deep dive into auto deployment, but was frustrated with the auto deployment templates “JSon’ing me to death”. I wanted to quickly post about a few tips working with templates and parameter files. JSon Format Checker If you’re like me, you have enough varying syntax formats in your brain…
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FYI- this was the one post I had to restore manually after my blog was hacked a week back. Its intact, but the post may appear a bit different than before, as I copied and pasted from the emailed version that occurs as part of my RSS feed. Enjoy! Azure CLI made me feel right at home after working at Oracle in the Enterprise Manager CLI, (EMCLI) The syntax is simple, powerful and allows an interface to manage Azure infrastructure from the command line, scripting out complex processing that would involve a lot of time in the user interface. I’d…
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They say the devil is in the details and as I come from the DevOps side of the house, it would only be natural that I’d be attracted to how Microsoft Flow works with Power BI. For those that aren’t familiar with Microsoft Flow, think of it like If This Then That, (IFTTT) from Microsoft. I used IFTTT to automate a number of tasks at my previous company- everything from posting to social media automation, notifications on Slack, creating weekly status reports and other tedious tasks that I hated having to do manually. Microsoft Flow, is a powerful SaaS tool…
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I spent this week speaking at two conferences that may not be familiar to my usual crowd: • Techwell StarEast Testing Conference in Orlando, FL • Interop ITX Data Conference in Las Vegas, NV StarEast Testing Conference Techwell’s event is attended by testers and had over 2000 attendees at the Hyatt Regency Orlando’s Convention Center. This is a huge convention center and I won’t lie- I did try to first register at the Mazda event and then the KPMG event. One of the attendees in my session admitted she was crashing my talk from the KPMG conference and I was pretty…
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I’m getting ready to get on a plane between two events today and have been so busy, that there’s been a break in blogging. That’s right folks, Kellyn has let a few things slide…. For those people on top of all the happenings in Kevlar’s life, I’ve been busy removing 15 years of possessions from my home so we can sell it in the next month, along with the purchase, upgrade and consolidation into a 42Ft. travel trailer. It’s quite an undertaking, so a few things have had to be put lower on the priority list to complete the rest.…
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I’m on track to fly home tomorrow, March 11th after nine days and three events. I’m pretty exhausted and just ready to go home and catch up on some sleep…:) I started out last weekend in Victoria BC and was thrilled to be on this emerald island of the Pacific Northwest. British Columbia is gorgeous as it is, but Victoria is a special place that quickly became one of my favorite places in the world. The Victoria event was an inaugural one and well attended. SQL Saturday Victoria was an event that Delphix sponsored and my peer, Serge, did an…
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The first edition of the free eBook is available for download at Delphix! It took us a bit to get the final updates to the eBook version completed and I want to thank everyone at Delphix who helped get the content updated with the latest additions, including the bossman, Eric Schrock and for helping me keep it all organized and finalized, shoutouts to Rita Rosenberg. If you’re interested in downloading a PDF copy, simply go to this link and get a version for yourself and find out what you need to know as a DBA about where we fit into…
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There are a plethora of mishaps in the early space program to prove the need for DevOps, but Fifty-five years ago this month, there was one in particular that is often used as an example for all. This simple human error almost ended the whole American space program and it serves as a strong example of why DevOps is essential as agile speeds up the development cycle. The Mariner I space probe was a pivotal point in the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. The space probe was a grand expedition into a series of large,…
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Doing three or four webinars in a month doesn’t seem like a big deal until you actually try to do it…and present at two or three events and make sure you do everything for your job outside of that, too. Suddenly you find yourself scrambling to keep up, but I’m known for taking on a few too many things at once… 🙂 Tomorrow at I’ll be presenting at 24HOP, also known as the 24 Hours of Pass, which is the webinar preview of The Pass Summit conference. This is a free web event to anyone who registers, so no matter…
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Database Administrators, (DBAs) through their own self-promotion, will tell you they’re the smartest people in the room and being such, will avoid buzzwords that create cataclysmic shifts in technology as DevOps has. One of our main role is to maintain consistent availability, which is always threatened by change and DevOps opposes this with a focus on methodologies like agile, continuous delivery and lean development. Residing a step or more behind bleeding edge has never phased the DBA. We were the cool kids by being retro, those refusing to fall for the latest trend or the coolest new feature, knowing that…
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Different combination in the game of tech create a winning roll of the dice and other times create a loss. Better communication between teams can offer a better opportunity to deter from holes in development cycle tools, especially when DevOps is the solution you’re striving for. It doesn’t hurt to have a map to help guide you. This interactive map from XebiaLabs can help offer a little clarity to the solutions, but there’s definitely some holes in multiple places that could be clarified a bit more. The power of this periodic table of DevOps tools, isn’t just that they are broken…
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The topic of DevOps and and Agile are everywhere, but how often do you hear Source Control thrown into the mix? Not so much in public, but behind the closed doors of technical and development meetings when Agile is in place, it’s a common theme. When source control isn’t part of the combination, havoc ensues and a lot of DBAs working nights on production with broken hearts. Control Freaks So what is source control and why is it such an important part of DevOps? The official definition of source control is: A component of software configuration management, version control, also…
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Along with the deep learning I’ve been allowed to do about data virtualization, I’ve learned a great deal about Test Data Management. Since doing so, I’ve started to do some informal surveys of the DBAs I run into and ask them, “How do you get data to your testers so that they can perform tests?” “How do you deliver code to different environments?” As a basic skill for a database administrator, we’re taught how to use export and import tools, along with cloning options to deliver data where its needed for various development and in succession, testing activities. If DBAs didn’t…
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if someone fraudulently uses your information for medical services or drugs, you could be held liable for the costs The demand for healthcare application development is exploding and has been exploding over the past couple of years because of Obama Care – Affordable Care Act Regulatory – HITECH and HIPAA Privacy Acts ICD 10 Pro-active Health Care (versus reactive health care) Mobile devices but to develop applications for health care requires the data to be masked. Why does masking data matter and matter especially for health care? If patient information gets out it can be quite damaging. One heuristic for…