Blogs

Dear SQL DBA - Performance Tuning with Erik Darling

Dear SQL DBA - Performance Tuning with Erik Darling

By Kendra Little on August 18, 2023 • 1 min read

SQL Server performance tuning expert Erik Darling joins the podcast today to chat about how good queries can go bad and how bad queries can get better.

He also answers the question on everyone’s mind: if he was a database, what database would he be?

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What To Do When They Are Sure It Was The Database... All The Time

What To Do When They Are Sure It Was The Database... All The Time

By Kendra Little on August 15, 2023 • 3 min read

It can be tiring to have the database constantly be the Prime Suspect for performance problems.

I’ve had many variations of this conversation over the years:

“Something happened, and we’re pretty sure it was the database. Again.”

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Dear SQL DBA: Tech Interviews in 2023 With Jeremiah Peschka

Dear SQL DBA: Tech Interviews in 2023 With Jeremiah Peschka

By Kendra Little on August 11, 2023 • 1 min read

Category: career

Tech interviews are weird and wacky. How did they get this way, and how SHOULD they be? Jeremiah Peschka joins us to discuss.

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Database DevOps Core Concepts: Migration Scripts

Database DevOps Core Concepts: Migration Scripts

By Kendra Little on August 9, 2023 • 6 min read

Database migration scripts are a popular and effective way to check database code into version control.

In this post I describe the most common features of popular migration script runners for database code deployment, along with the top gotchas that folks hit when versioning their database code with migrations.

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Dear SQL DBA - Data Roles: DBA, DBRE, and Data Engineer

Dear SQL DBA - Data Roles: DBA, DBRE, and Data Engineer

By Kendra Little on August 4, 2023 • 1 min read

There are lots of jobs for data folks. In this episode, I discuss three hot job titles: Database Administrator (DBA), Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE), and Data Engineer (DE).

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Why Not Call Database DevOps Simply DevOps?

Why Not Call Database DevOps Simply DevOps?

Sometimes people are annoyed by the term ‘Database DevOps’. Why not call it simply ‘DevOps’? After all, Database DevOps follows the same core principles.

The answer is simple: implementing DevOps is tricky by itself, but most teams are set up to fail when it comes to implementing DevOps for databases. This makes it worth defining as a specialization.

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The Difference Between DBAs, DBREs, and Data Engineers

The Difference Between DBAs, DBREs, and Data Engineers

By Kendra Little on July 26, 2023 • 5 min read

Twenty years ago, database administrators (DBAs) were the primary career path when it came to specializing in data management.

Much has changed: development patterns transformed from Waterfall to Agile, DevOps drives automation and shared ownership of code, and cloud services have made many more kinds of PaaS databases, data lakes, and data lakehouses available to organizations of all sizes.

These changes have introduced new and varied career paths for data folks which have different emphases on skill sets. In this post, I talk through the commonalities and differences between DBAs, Database Reliability Engineers (DBREs), and Data Engineers (DEs). Whether you’re a hiring manager or data professional, it’s worth knowing about these roles.

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