Voice of the DBA Steve Jones

Recently I traveled to visit a customer who has an in-the-office culture. They have multiple large buildings outside a major US city and almost all their employees (7000+) live nearby and are expected to be in the office the whole week. More senior people can opt for 4 10-hour shifts rather than 5 8-hour shifts, but with few exceptions, they have people in the office.
I hadn't seen that in a long time. Almost every customer is mostly remote or some level of hybrid (usually 2-3 days a week in the office). What's more, they have an open culture, with rows of desks for teams and spaces between the rows for managers and directors. No cubes!
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As I work through 2024, I found myself doing a little more vacation planning this year than in previous ones. In 2022 I traveled quite a bit, but my wife went with me often. We went to Europe 5 times that year and added quite a few vacation days around my work trips. My wife thought that was a great year.
Last year, 2023, was different. I traveled more (36 trips), with most of them being short. When I traveled that much, I wanted to end trips quickly and get back home. I learned that was too many, and also too disruptive for life. I got behind on things I needed to do at home, my wife went with me less because many trips were all work, and I lacked energy from the pace of moving all over the world.
Read the rest of When Are Your Breaks?

One of the ideas behind DevOps is that we minimize the time between code commit and deployment to production. We want to avoid work-in-progress and bottlenecks to getting our software into the hands of customers. This has led a lot of companies to release more often, albeit with smaller sets of features. The total number of things delivered under DevOps might not be greater, but it often is more targeted to those things our customers want/need/use.
However, the idea of releasing often means that we try not to stack up too much work before deploying it. What does that mean for holidays and the code freezes or no-deploy periods that many companies have? How do you implement a code freeze under DevOps?
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I subscribe to quite a few newsletters, and one of them is for job hunters. I have a great job, maybe the best job for me, but I like to keep in touch with what's going on because I, well, I have job insecurity and worry about being without a job. I think this is leftover from childhood. I also want to know how to help others in finding their dream job.
Recently there was a question asking when it was time for a new job How can you tell (for yourself) when you should be seeking new opportunities? It might not be easy to recognize for many of you. Perhaps you don't realize there are other opportunities you might appreciate because you're comfortable. Perhaps you're the frog in water that's being heated so slowly that you don't realize how poor your current situation is for your health.
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I've had a good career in database work. I've had success, and I've had some failures, fortunately the former far outpacing the latter. In my career across many companies, the code I've written has tended to work well, or at least well enough. I've managed systems and ensured a high uptime, and solved issues quickly. I have left quite a few jobs in technology, some because I was unhappy, some for better opportunities.
I was asked to leave one job. I disagreed with my boss, thought he was a jerk, and our CTO told me this person was more valuable than I was at that time. The CTO suggested I move on, so I did. That day.
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CosmosDB has been a great data platform in the Azure cloud that helps companies deal with disparate types of data. The CosmosDB APIs include those for MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and Gremlin. These wire-level protocols let you work in a way that is compatible with those systems for storing data.
That's coming to SQL Server.
Read the rest of CosmosDB APIs Inside SQL Server 2024