Two important maxims that I learnt in school are: 'Know something about everything and everything about something' (thank you, James O'Brien) and 'Always be learning'.

Because one can't know everything about...

If you have the opportunity to do so, go the country in question and apply from there. You find many more jobs advertised there and you are less likely to...

Hi tindog,

I have only looked for work in a few countries and most of them in Europe.

In my experience, employers are primarily interested in the talent that they...

Hi Lynn,

Working from home is hard. I do it now and then when a child has an appointment at the doctor's and when my wife is not at home. It...

For me there are several variables at play.

After I finished university, I got the opportunity to go and live & work in Japan on the JET Programme. I was single...

Hi Steve,

I take two views on this: on the one hand, for work, we use a password generation program to create and store our server and login passwords. They are...

In my experience, the choice of RDBMS is a management decision (and often a senior management decision). DBAs and technical people are hired knowing this. It is rare that DBAs...

To be fair to PostgresSQL, it is a nice DB to work with. I haven't used it in a while though.

Essentially bigger customers are paying for smaller customers.

If they charged a flat fee, it would be great for the bigger customers (because they'd pay less) and bad for Microsoft (because...

I'd like to see a much more simplified licensing structure too — enterprise for everyone and charge license fees determined by a formula based on instance RAM and cores allocated...

Well, to be fair, I'd didn't expect them to put me on a data-warehouse project immediately. What I expected was that she'd be excited about it, let me organise a...

It is the over-compartmentalisation that does it. I was a year into a job as a DBA and I had gotten a grip on what was to be done. I...

Hi Steve,

I have 2 mottos (motti?): 'Festina lente' (make haste slowly — otherwise you make sloppy mistakes and forget things) and 'always be learning'.

For the latter, there is always something...

That reminds me of a Calvin & Hobbes' cartoon. If I remember correctly, Calvin asks his father how the load limits on bridges are determined and Calvin's father replies that...

A part of this increase in data-size is our sloppiness in database design. We throw in GUIDs everywhere partly because it is in fashion, partly because it makes development easier...