The creativity of some hackers and malicious actors is just amazing. There is a new bit of malware out there now that highlights some new approaches that I think we’ll start to see more of, and at the same time, incorporates SQL Server, which (at least since some infamous older issues) hasn’t been the specific key component of issues for […]
Azure SQL Database
SQL Server instance growth, management
I was reading an interesting article in DBTA (April/May 2018, “The Headaches of Microsoft SQL Server Sprawl“) and it was clear that so many of us are facing some pretty significant challenges when it comes to managing SQL Server instances. Particularly true if you consider “SQL Server instances” to include your Azure instances and/or managed instances on Azure and AWS. […]
Inventory control and your databases….
No, not the “what servers do you have and what do they have on them” variety necessarily. In a previous life, inventory and point of sale systems were a focus, and one of the great things that we could nearly always point to surrounded that initial inventory of the store location – their stuff on the shelves. So many times, […]
Planning that next platform upgrade or migration
Completing a migration, whether it’s for version-to-version migration or for platform updates or even moving to a cloud-based solution from an on-premises solution, is a major project. Even a sideways version swap, accompanied by a platform change can mean all sorts of things in terms of settings, features, capabilities that may have to be modified, for sure have to be […]
Beware the dark side of capacity
When you’re working with resources that are dedicated instances, powerful instances, you can get caught up a bit in the fact that it can take a lot more to trip up those resources than perhaps you’re used to. It’s sort of like flying as the only passenger in an airplane made for commercial flight; there is likely a lot more […]
Using Throw-Away Databases, Tables
We’ve been doing some work with a few different database systems that are supported on the different cloud platforms – work where we’re using the databases as either a pre-processing or holding-zone for data that isn’t quite yet ready to be fed into the overall scheme of things for the customers. It was an odd realization that with many of […]
Data Architecture Challenge – “Active Archives”
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges that we’re all working through right now is working with the volumes of data on hand, and maintaining it in a usable way. We’ve been working with a couple of different clients to create ways to either use some of Azure’s Elastic Database approach, or move different information bits to different systems that would […]
The Cloud Does, Indeed, Not Fix Everything
Yesterday the post was about possibly using a move of servers to help ferret out things to review in your architecture (and not using it as a chance to necessarily block access that may have been lost control of). There was a good point made in the comments – John said “Those DTUs will kill your wallet if you don’t […]
Love/Hate Relationship with Unstructured Data
No doubt you’ve seen, and perhaps been working with unstructured solutions out there – DynamoDB, Azure Table Storage, and there are many other options as well. It’s pretty cool that you can define key/value pairs and just start dumping information into the system, really without regard to structure and columns and many of the things that have traditionally made up […]
Does the Cloud Force Data Silos?
As we’ve been working with different people, and, embarrassingly, our own systems, I’ve been noticing a trend. It’s been bugging me for a while now, but I’ve not really been able to put words to it. I mentioned in the prior editorial that multi-platform was important. Basically, use the right tool for the job at hand. And then I noticed […]