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…
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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…
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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…
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As I battle to get my suitcase back from my Austin trip from over a week ago, (yes, United is still trying to locate it!) I’m preparing to head out to Denver next week to attend RMOUG Training Days 2025. I had missed submitting a talk, but when I discovered they were turning into a free event, I was curious to see how it transitions and my boss said I should go, so looking forward to seeing some great topics from some wonderful speakers! Meanwhile, I’m busy working on a number of demands for Redgate around Oracle, MongoDB and AI,…
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Few things frustrate travelers more than lost baggage, and United Airlines certainly tested my patience last week. There were plenty of chances for them to shine in customer service, but their online platform and mobile app ended up being prime examples of what not to do—for both customers and their own service representatives. Background I was flying back to Portland from Austin on Friday, during record cold temperatures across the Southwest. Overhead storage in the cabin was packed with travelers’ winter gear—despite requests to wait until all passengers had boarded—which left me, one of the first in group #3, without…
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2024 was a pretty busy year for me. It was one marked with change as I shifted the beginning of the year into my role at Silk as Director of Data and AI. We began focusing heavily on my abilities to navigate the technology landscape and identify what was required as a company at Silk to make the most of it. As I had time, I was heavily involved at DZone writing content on a slew of topics, which I really enjoyed. I think the biggest surprise was that you realize with a small pivot, tech is often handled the…
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For many DBAs, the thought of running Oracle on a Windows OS induces a collective cringe. Even for someone like me, with a career spanning both Microsoft and Oracle technologies, it’s a combination I typically avoid. However, there are scenarios—driven by licensing, software requirements, or other factors—where deploying Oracle on Windows becomes the logical choice. I recently encountered such a scenario while assisting a team I enjoy working with at Redgate. The task was to refresh and streamline our demo virtual machine (VM) image, which included Oracle running on Windows. Here was my planned approach: Export any data that needed…
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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’m passionate about making technology easier to understand, a mission I’ve pursued on my blog since 2008. However, I’ve faced challenges when educating newer Oracle users about the differences between single-instance (older architecture) and multitenant (newer architecture) models, as well as how these two architectures are connected. For those of us with extensive Oracle experience, these concepts may feel straightforward. This is especially true for professionals who work across multiple platforms, as Oracle was relatively late to adopt multitenancy. For instance, SQL Server has embraced this model since its earlier versions—going back to my experience with SQL Server 6.0—making it…
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Now that I’ve been at Redgate as the newest Advocate, along with my engineering duties, let’s talk about the annual event so many of us attend each year in the Microsoft data community- PASS Data Community Summit. My schedule is shaping up to be a busy one and I want to make sure that folks know where I’ll be through the week. SQL Saturday Oregon/SW Washington My week starts the weekend before, where I will be doing the keynote at SQL Saturday Oregon/SW Washington. The keynote will be on “Why Can’t AI Do the Dishes Already?” and will follow a…
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I’ve been getting that question a lot lately. When I left Microsoft 16 months ago, there was more than one betting pool on which cloud I would go to next, knowing my history and short attention span, but maybe I’m softening in my old age. I surprised a few when I went to one of the partners that I’d worked with for almost four years while at Microsoft, Silk and over a period of a few months, became their Director of Data and AI. It was a good opportunity for me, as they understood I needed a lot to keep…
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I’ve just returned from Data Saturday Oslo and Data Saturday Dallas, and tomorrow I’m off to Oracle Cloud World. Both Data Saturday events were amazing, even with the little hiccup of my lost luggage in Oslo. The experience was made even better by the incredible gluten-free options provided by my gracious hosts—special thanks to Johan for that! At the Dallas event, in addition to presenting on the benefits of leveraging instant extracts with Azure Fabric, I led a session on thriving with ADHD. The room filled up quickly, and while some may have been surprised by the large turnout, I…
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In the midst of us needing to do more with less every day, many of us are incorporating clones to simplify data refreshes to non-production database environments. Working harder is just not an option when we can use newer technology to get more by doing less. Knowing Your Environment Doing less effectively requires some planning for Oracle and a few questions to be asked: Will you need to deploy to a new host/VM target as part of a clone? Will an image with Oracle be used for the new Host/VM target or will you need to build out the Oracle…
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There’s a large influx of PostgreSQL databases coming into the market. It only makes sense to use this robust open-source database for any new project and to migrate those which can to an open-source solution, saving thousands, if not millions of dollars in database licensing costs. Most of these deployments are as PaaS (Platform as a Service) databases with cloud vendors. To maintain the ability to scale to meet the needs of so many customers, cloud vendors, in general, limit and throttle individual resources. Logically, if you’re able to determine what individual resources will require, it’s much easier to control…
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So, this last week I had the opportunity to speak and attend at the SQLbits conference. This was high on my list after attending an Oracle event last year where even attendees and organizers there mentioned that they admired the conference and the way that it was run. I fully admit to running the full gambit of either hyper-aware or completely oblivious and with SQLBits, I’d been a bit of the latter and I wanted to change that. Now I want to preface this post with saying that I refer to this month as “March madness” and that means that…
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It’s almost my turn to present my video this year on December 13th, for the 2023 Festive Tech Calendar. I chose to do something fun vs. something about the cloud or databases, etc. This blog post has all the support info on the spinning Xmas tree, along with the RPI playing Xmas music and flashing Xmas colored lights, while the video goes into everything about the Raspberry Pi, why contribute to this year’s event donation and my project demo. Project Goal To use a Lego Xmas tree, attach it to a DC motor and use code with a Raspberry PI…
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I’ve been pretty busy with work and travel, but I finally got an official Silk Github repository to publish a couple new white papers and sizing assessment worksheets for customer access. These are primarily Oracle and SQL Server to Azure focused white papers, but I will be publishing ones on GCP next, to be followed by AI and other database platforms soon. White Papers The A2Z on Oracle for Azure The A2Z on SQL Server to the Cloud The slides for the session that is part of the research that went into the white paper above can be found here. …
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Five years? Really? Yes, it’s been five years since I joined Microsoft and I can honestly say, it’s been a blast! I’ve been doing the odd-year anniversary posts- 1, 3 and now 5 years at Microsoft. What are some of the top reasons to work at Microsoft from my own experience? Great managers. I’ve had, overall, the best direct managers of any company, while here at Microsoft. I really appreciate the great training they give Microsoft management and I think it does help ensure that you have managers that are present to make your workday better. Cool benefits- I can’t…