Terraform wasn't released until 2014. Ansible was around but Windows-focused Azure automation wasn't its strength. In 2013, if you wanted repeatable, version-controlled Azure infrastructure, the native answer was Azure Resource Manager templates — JSON documents that described the infrastructure you wanted and let Azure figure out how
There is a specific moment I have learned to recognize. You are creating a new stored procedure, or building another SSIS package, or writing another CREATE TABLE statement, and you open up a previous one to copy the structure. Not the business logic — just the skeleton. The error handling, the
At some point in almost every growing Azure deployment, the conversation shifted from "how do we make this SQL Server more available" to "how do we make it handle more load." Scale up — bigger VM size, more memory — was the first lever. It was often enough.
The hardest tests to write aren't the ones that verify simple logic — those are manageable with FakeTable and AssertEquals. The hard ones are tests for stored procedures that call other stored procedures. You're trying to test Procedure A, but Procedure A calls Procedure B, which sends
The dev cluster said the job worked. The UAT cluster said the job worked. Then we deployed to production and the job failed in under four minutes with a ClassNotFoundException that had never appeared in either environment. What was different? On dev, the team had manually installed a newer version
Certification
I passed the exam! Woo hoo! It feels great to have passed this milestone. I want to finish up this series so I can help you pass too! I will say there are some
Certification
January 31 is coming up pretty fast ,Just 3 more days, so I want to try to knock out the rest of the study guide in the next couple days so that I'm ready
Certification
January 31st is the day I've set to take the 70-457: Transition Your MCTS on SQL Server 2008 to MCSA: SQL Server 2012, Part 1. So let's jump right in to the
One of my resume items from this period is "Designed and Implemented High Availability and Disaster Recovery Plans for SQL Server." In the Azure IaaS context, this meant SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups running across Azure Availability Sets. It sounds straightforward until you start working through the Azure-specific
career development
I'm back baby! I've been away from the blog far too long! I logged back in after four months and found comments waiting, updates to perform and a host of other
Most developers learn unit testing as a retrofit: they have existing code, they write tests for it, and if they're diligent they maintain both going forward. Test-driven development flips that. You write the test first. The test fails because the code doesn't exist yet. Then you
Every data team I've worked with has a folder somewhere — usually called something like "Utilities" or "Scripts" or "Misc" — full of .sql files with names like fix_customer_ids_2011.sql and reprocess_orders_march.sql and TEMP_DO_NOT_DELETE.sql.