In January I had the chance to attend Storage Field Day 19 in Santa Clara, where we got to meet with a wide variety of startups and large enterprise storage companies. One of the more interesting companies we meet with was MinIO which has a really interesting and compelling object-based storage product. I’ve talked about […]
Category: vendors
Storage Field Day 19–Western Digital #SFD19
As I mentioned in my post last week I recently had the opportunity to attend Storage Field Day 19, where I got to meet with a wide variety of storage software and hardware companies in Silicon Valley. One of the more interesting companies we met with was a longtime player in storage—Western Digital. (Disclosure—I own […]
Vendors: Tell Me What Your Product Costs
A couple of weeks ago, my friend and colleague Matthew Roche (t), put out a poll about people’s feelings about vendors who don’t publicly advertise the costs associated with their products. In the past, in a disconnected world, when most of your customers had sales reps, and being able to find all of your competitors […]
Don’t Let Your Infrastructure Team Design Your Data Protection Strategy
In the last two days, I’ve been part of two discussions, one of which was about the need to run CHECKDB on modern storage (yes, the answer is always yes, and twice on Sundays), and then another about problems with third party backup utilities. Both of these discussions were born out of (at the end […]
SQL Server on Linux Licensing
Now that SQL Server 2017 has gone GA and SQL Server on Linux is a reality, you may wonder how it effects your licensing bill? Well there’s good news—SQL Server on Linux has exactly the same licensing model as on Windows. And Docker, if you are using it for non-development purposes (pro-tip: don’t use Docker […]
Monitoring Availability Groups—New Tools from Solarwinds
As I mentioned in my post a couple of weeks ago, monitoring the plan cache on a readable secondary replica can be a challenge. My customer was seeing dramatically different performance, depending on whether a node was primary or secondary. As amazing as the Query Store in SQL Server 2016 is, it does not allow […]
An “Ask” for Microsoft—A Global Price List
And yes, I just used ask as a noun (I feel dirty), I wouldn’t do that in any other context, but this one. In reviewing my end of year blog metrics, my number one post from last year was a post that listed the list price of SQL Server. I wrote this post because a) […]
But What about Postgres?
What About Postgres? Since I wrote my post yesterday about Oracle and SQL Server, I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback (except for one grouchy Oracle DBA) on my post. That said, I should probably stay clear of Redwood Shores anytime soon. However there was one interesting comment from Brent Ozar (b|t) While Postgres is […]
The SQL Virtualization Tax?
I’ve been working in virtual server environments for a long time, and a big proponent of virtualization. It’s a great way to reduce hardware costs and power consumption, and frankly for smaller shops it’s also their easy foray into high availability. The main reason for the high availability are technologies like VMWare’s vMotion and Microsoft’s […]
Vendors, Again—8 Things To Do When Delivering a Technical Sales Presentation
In the last two days, I’ve sat through some of the most horrific sales presentations I’ve ever done—this was worse than the time share in Florida. If you happen to be a vendor and reading (especially if you are database vendor—don’t worry it wasn’t you), I hope this helps you craft better sales messages. In […]