Databases et al...
Microsoft Fabric is software-as-a-service platform for data processing, business intelligence reporting, and even online transaction processing apps. Fabric has been generally available since November, 2023. Building planet scale platforms is hard, and I have a great deal of sympathy for engineers and architects who are dealing with layoffs, constant pressure for new features, and the [ ]
Yesterday, I gave a presentation at Microsoft Fabcon in Atlanta titled “Building the Well-Architected Framework for Fabric”. I’ve been a public speaker for nearly 20 years, and I don’t usually get nervous before a talk. Not that I was shaking yesterday, but given this was a new topic for me, and a big crowd (I [ ]
I recently started a new role, and I wanted to talk about what I did in my last role—it wasn’t top secret or anything, but it was somewhat different than my normal operations. I’d like to thank everyone at Designmind for giving me this opportunity, as it was a very interesting role. I didn’t leave [ ]
Ever since the parquet format came out over a decade ago, it became very popular for analytics workloads. Being columnar in format, it allowed for massive scale analytics, while delivering strong and lossless compression. Various engines including Snowflake, Databricks, Synapse, SQL Server, and other databases I m likely ignoring can all interact with Parquet. In it s [ ]
There’s a lot of crap out there when you read about Artificial Intelligence projects, especially on LinkedIn, where I suspect half of the posts may have been created by AI bots. However, we recently implemented a process that included the use of an LLM, but in a very controlled fashion. The overall implementation process was [ ]
This week Microsoft Front Door suffered another major outage. I wrote about the last outage(s) in my column at Redmond just a couple of weeks ago. Microsoft Front Door is a global content delivery network that does a number of other services for websites/APIs/endpoints. One of the challenges around Front Door is that being a [ ]
I m a big fan of using cloud services if you are going to use open source databases like PostgreSQL or MySQL. The cloud services abstract away a lot of the messiness around high availability and backups that are commonly associated with, well frankly clustering on Linux. (I ve built some really nice MySQL clusters on Windows [ ]
I ve seen a couple of posts (of course they were chock full of AI slop images) on LinkedIn in the last couple of weeks, talking about how challenging it is to implement Kubernetes. In the most recent post I saw, it stated that it took 5 months for our CEO to implement Kubernetes for our [ ]
This morning, SQL Server 2025 Release Candidate 0 was released. You can see the new features list and details here. Of course, I ll be writing more about the forthcoming release in the next several months both here and in my column at Redmondmag.com. However, I wanted to get a quick post about something that made [ ]
I once heard a product manager say we ll do security after go-live to describe an early phase product s glaring lack of granularity of security controls. As anyone reading this, who has written the tiniest piece of software, you will know that doing security after go-live is a complete recipe for disaster. One of the challenges [ ]