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What I'm Up To

Upcoming Events
New Recordings
  • SQL in the City Streamed – Free Redgate training livestream – Watch
  • How DevOps Keeps DBAs Safe from Being Automated Out of a Job – Watch
  • Redgate Evangelist YouTube Channel: Tutorials on Database DevOps –New videos each week – Watch
  • DevOps: What, who, why and how? – 1 hour – Watch
  • Get Inspired: Celebrate the Careers of Three DevOps Heroes – 1 hour – Watch
  • What ‘Digital Transformation’ means, and how you can use it to advance your career– 1 hour – Watch
  • Can This Team Succeed at DevOps? Panel discussion – 1 hour – Watch
  • SQL In the City Streamed – Watch the whole stream
    • Crucial data privacy and protection insights for 2010 – with Richard Macaskill – 45 minutes – Watch
    • The four keys to unlocking DevOps – 30 minutes – Watch
  • The Best of 2018 and Predictions for 2019 (Panel with Steve, Grant, and Kathi) – 1 hour – Watch
  • What We’ve Learned about Adopting Database DevOps, and What to Avoid (MVP Panel with Guest Panelist Tony Maddonna) – 1 hour – Watch

What’s Unique About SQL Saturdays: Nearly Everyone Interacts with Other People

Kendra Little
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My friend and colleague, Kathi Kellenberger, taking questions in her SQL Saturday session on Machine Learning for beginners Today I was looped in on an email thread about the pros and cons of attending a specific event. One person on the thread asked if any of us had attended the event in the past, and whether or not event attendees were engaged with presenters and vendor representatives. My immediate thought was: of course the attendees were engaged, because the event is a SQL Saturday.  I’ve never been to a SQL Saturday where the attendees weren’t engaged. But, I realized that it’s a fair question. This level of interaction isn’t a given for events, much less tech events I’ve been to other tech events — from free events to very expensive ones — where attendees didn’t interact much with anyone else. Mostly people worked away on their laptops/phones/tablets quietly (maybe taking…
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How to recognize the early stages of burnout, and my treatment plan

Kendra Little
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I recently realized that I’m in the early stages of burnout. This isn’t an unfamiliar place for me, but it is new for me to recognize the early signs of burnout in myself before it becomes a full-fledged disaster. This time, I’m thinking about how I got here, and making an explicit plan to change course. In the hopes of helping someone else out there, I thought some public journaling might be in order. How do you recognize if you’re in the early stages of burnout? I have recognized two symptoms which I identify as unusual for me. Together they indicate I’m heading towards burnout. Symptom 1: Lately, I get frustrated and angry by small things One warning sign of burnout is when small inconveniences start causing a disproportionately large emotional response. For example, on a recent weekend I was traveling for work. I was in the Detroit area, about…
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Paying down technical debt

Kendra Little
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One of the cool things that I do as an Evangelist at Redgate is to periodically visit company headquarters in Cambridge. The other Evangelists and I get to meet with every software developer, product manager, and UX designer at Redgate over a series of meetings. That’s really cool. We talk about things that they’ve released lately, what they’re looking at doing in the near future, and we get to give feedback based on what we hear from the community and from folks in the sales process. We also get to share what we personally think should happen in these products now. As you might imagine, I have a wish list for features in a variety of different Redgate products Our products are great, and one of the things about great products is that users are always inspired to want to use them in new ways, so I never lack for…
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What is Automation?

Kendra Little
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Photo by 수안 최 on Unsplash Today I got a bit closer to a meaningful definition of automation, as it applies to the software development process. I’ve been turning this concept over in my head for a while, which is partly related to the dreaded question of licensing. Why should licensing an automation product be related to the number of users? A few weeks ago, I was chatting a bit in the SQL Server Community Slack Channel.✣ One community member was frustrated with running into situations with per-user licensing for monitoring and automation products. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard grumbling about per-user licensing, of course — with any licensing model, you’re going to hear grumbling about it, that’s just how licensing goes. But I think per-user licensing can make a lot of sense when it comes to automation products, because of the nature of automation. I work for Redgate, which does…
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Should release cadence be slowed if you don’t have database load testing?

Kendra Little
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I got a question recently about a panel discussion on Database Development Disasters at SQL in the City Streamed. I had framed a question as, “how fast should development go without load or performance testing?” I got a follow-up question from my friend Chris Randvere at Redgate: he asked for more information about what the question meant? I realized that my wording had been pretty unclear. I had meant to ask the panelists what their thoughts were on release cadence when a team lacks tooling to do automated load and performance testing outside of production. Should the lack of automated performance testing ability change the rate at which we deploy software? In other words, if we can’t do performance and load testing, does that mean that we should or shouldn’t deploy a change to a database every weekday? I don’t think we covered this super-well in the panel because I…
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Upcoming full day training: “How to Architect Successful Database Changes”

Kendra Little
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I’m excited to be teaching a full day session with Steve Jones at the SQL PASS Summit on Tuesday, November 5, in Seattle. Steve and I will be discussing proven patterns to version and deploy changes successfully Read more about this precon session, or check out the video below where I give a brief overview of what Steve and I will cover. Will you teach me how to use Redgate tools? Nope– not in this session. While Steve and I both work for Redgate, we will be showing patterns and approaches that work with both vendor and custom tooling, and we’ll do demos with a variety of tools, including free tools when possible. This is absolutely not a product-specific session, and the patterns discussed have been proven in the industry by developers and DBAs using a wide variety of tooling. If you’d like to learn more about Redgate tools, check…
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