In the past week or so, the Microsoft Data Platform community has begun having a discussion about inclusivity, both on Twitter and across community blog posts. This conversation began when a member of the community shared their story about being repeatedly mis-gendered and additionally feeling excluded, unwelcome, and hurt at a series of community events. Historically the legacy SQL Server community has had quite visible support for Women in Technology, but has not shifted broadly/overall to a public focus on larger Diversity and Inclusion issues. There have been efforts to be more inclusive to people of color and members of the LGBTQ community, but these efforts have have not been nearly as visible or “popular” within the community as the efforts to support WIT. I don’t write this in an accusatory way, only to describe the state of things as I see them. I have not worked to change this,…

I asked a question on Twitter yesterday: If running SQL Server 2008 in an Azure VM (no SQL upgrade possible, extended support in place), is the best option for high availability Database Mirroring? Or something else I am not thinking of? #sqlhelp— Kendra Little (@Kendra_Little) January 31, 2020 And check out the magic of the sqlhelp hash tag, I got loads of answers! So many that I’m actually selecting a few here for the purposes of keeping this post readable. First, John Morehouse , a smartie and a consultant who does a lot of great work in the cloud and on-prem helped me figure out what would be needed for clustering (which isn’t something you can do simply with this version in an Azure VM)… I belive you could also cluster it but you’ll need SIOS for the storage. I think. DisclaImer: I’ve never tried it. Mirroring should work as…

In this 70 minute livestream recording, I kick the tires of a fresh new Azure DevOps demo environment showing Redgate’s Hybrid Model for SQL Source Control and SQL Change Automation. I had just set up this whole demo environment and its pipelines, so the video shows me troubleshooting and fixing an option or two in Azure DevOps which I hasn’t configured quite correctly — which makes things all the more fun for a livestream. If you want to skip watching me installing ZoomIt in the new demo environment (which I’d completely forgotten– how could I??? I can’t show things without Zoomit!) then start at around 6 minutes.

One of most the fun things about working as an Advocate at Redgate is getting to help clients determine their preferred workflow for database DevOps. Teams often have unique requirements and are using different combinations of tooling, so figuring out the best way to accomplish what they need typically involves leveraging what I already know, collaborating with my coworkers and the client to generate ideas, researching and prototyping solutions, and then getting feedback from everyone. This week, I’ve been thinking about a scenario which may come into play when an organization is moving away from a monolith architecture toward a microservices architecture One pattern which can enable this move is to at first increase the use of schemas within the existing large legacy database, and begin to document and understand dependencies between different parts of the codebase. Over time, the goal is to reduce dependencies and to begin to move…