Category Archives: General

What Did that Geek Just Say?

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, maintains a Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures. The dictionary is a great place to go to find out what people are talking about. It is also a great place to looking for different ways of doing things. I sometimes even go to the site just to look for entertaining technical concepts, like the “Cactus Stack”, “Stooge Sort” or even “Big-O Notation”. Continue reading

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Community Based Training

There is a real un-served niche in the market for DBA delivered community training materials. The idea would be to work together as a community to create common course materials and delivery scripts that would be presented by individual DBAs to the teams they support. Everyone would get roughly the same experience while having a trainer that can speak directly to their specific questions or even look at examples using their specific data. Continue reading

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Why Do I Need All These Servers?

Working in a large corporate environment I am frequently getting requests for a new server to do this or that. Running through the usual questions to determine scope and scale, the price can get high pretty quickly. Inevitably, talk turns to ideas on how to cut the cost while still delivering a robust platform. Continue reading

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