One of the challenges in moving to the cloud is achieving a similar level of performance to what you would get with dedicated hardware on-premises. The cloud is someone else's computer, and you are limited to the choices that the vendors allow you to rent. In many cases, you might even share the physical hardware resources with other customers, though many cloud providers have started to allow dedicated hardware reservations in the last few years.

One of the challenges of choosing a PaaS cloud database platform is that there are often restrictions that differ from a similar platform on-premises. This is often to ensure that one customer doesn't affect another, or that customers don't make changes that might prevent the vendor from supporting the system. Azure SQL Database gives us a database only, no instance features, though we do see a virtual master database.

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A big part of SQL Server Central has been members of the community answering questions for others. We have an amazing community and over the years, it's been helpful to so many people. I often get the thanks, but really the people at the top of the all-time list have been those that have helped many people. There are too many to list, but gilamonster, Jeff Moden, lynn-pettis, lowell, and more have been tremendous assets to our community.

Part of the inspiration for StackOverflow years ago was SQL Server Central and the popularity of people helping others. The main thing their founders didn't like from us (and other sites) was the need to register. Hence, the ability to be anonymous on Stack if you choose. No matter what format or style of Q&A you like, Stack and many other sites have found that there is a lot of desire to ask and answer questions online.

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When I was getting my career going in Denver, Microsoft used to host lunch sessions every few weeks in their office. There were some Microsoft employees presenting and some community members. I learned a lot from both groups. At local user groups, more often than not, a community speaker was present, but there were plenty of people that worked for different vendor companies that delivered talks. I saw many of these people are knowledgeable in their area, and they taught me things I used in my job.

At some point, it started to seem that presenters that worked for companies weren't experts, and maybe more importantly, they weren't worth listening to because they were "selling something." In fact, a large community conference, and some small ones, banned "vendor" talks and the use of tools in presentations. Sometimes even free ones, if someone was promoting the software as the focus in their talk.

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When we design software or databases, we have to make decisions right now. If you work in as many environments as I have, this means I'm often picking a tool, platform, version, technology, or something else without a complete set of information. In some cases, I'm actually writing code (SQL or C#/Java/etc.) without completely knowing the business problem I'm solving. I do know what someone described, but as many of us find out, those descriptions often prove to be lacking.

Over time, we refine the code with feedback from users, which is why DevOps has become so popular. We write the best code we can and then quickly alter code if we haven't hit the mark. We constantly adjust by making small changes and improvements.

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I think that most of us feel like an impostor at some time in our lives.  We will get asked to do something we've never done, with others expressing confidence in us. We may tackle the task, or we may not. We may succeed or we may not In any of those cases, we may still feel like an impostor, someone that isn't really qualified to do this thing. Many of us continue to feel this way in our careers, suffering from impostor's syndrome.

While I know that I'm good at my job, good at working with SQL Server and teaching others to do so, I still suffer from impostor syndrome at times. There are periods where my mind wonders if I've just gotten lucky and slipped through some evaluation process. Maybe my knowledge hasn't been well tested. Will someone like my boss, or their boss, question my skills at some point and get rid of me? Will I be able to find another job if that happens? Can I really compete with others out there? This isn't a constant or regular feeling, but I do experience it at times.

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Developers, in general, are very optimistic about the code they write. This is likely one cause of their estimates of the time required being low, as well as the various bugs that slip through because of corner cases that appear for the problem being solved. Often developers think they've considered the various ways this code ought to work and covered all the possibilities. Usually we find they've not thought about the problem from other perspectives and need to adjust their code.

They often also feel that their code is superior to others, and that they can examine a problem in a new way. One of the reasons that I think many developers want to rewrite systems in some new technology or new way, embracing the Not-Invented-Here way of looking at other people's code. They want to write their own solution.

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I just paid off my mobile phone. In my case, this is a phone from Google Fi, which provides fantastic service for me. The phone works well in any country I travel to, without any extra roaming costs outside the US for data. That works well, since it's a data device, and not really a voice device for me. Even overseas, lots of my calls are through some data service, like Facebook Messenger.

The decision for me now is whether to upgrade my phone. I've been getting some promotions and I've seen some deals from other retail outlets on phones, so I've been considering changing my Galaxy S20 for an S22 (perhaps plus) or a Pixel 6. There have been some improvements in cameras, and those are really the only change I'd notice.

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We've run Kubernetes inside Redgate for some research projects (like Spawn) and we are building some skills running this orchestrator. At the same time, we've had no shortage of challenges in keeping the clusters up at times, patching, fixing issues, upgrading to new configurations, etc. Like any software, there is work involved with managing the orchestrator.

I've watched Andrew Pruski and Anthony Nocentino write about containers and Kubernetes and overall they've made me view the clusters like email. It's useful and I want to use it, but I don't want to manage or administer it. I'd want some service like AKS or EKS instead. Let someone else build expertise.

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When I was starting my career, I expected to be a programmer. That's what people who wrote the software were called. At some point they adopted "developer" instead, shunning the programmer label. Now I see software engineers has replaced developer in many organizations. I'm not sure the job is much different than it was in 1990, other than the specific technologies used.

The DBA used to do a lot of system administration-type work on database instances. Check logs, set security, run backups, and maybe look at some queries. However, in many cases, their work was limited to things running inside the database software, or the database software itself (patches, related configuration for the host OS, etc.). I saw recently that DBAs have started to adopt the data (or database) engineer label as a new job title. Presumably, this pays more because, well, it sounds like it should. Data Professional sounds more comprehensive and skilled than Database Administrator. Database Engineer sounds better than both.

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Many of us know that reducing financial debt in our lives leads to a bit more security in our minds. We are better able to cope with unexpected expenses when we have the ability to get credit or pay for something in cash. If you've ever had a major house repair, car calamity, or (hopefully not) medical issue, you know what I mean. At least in the US. That last one is less of an issue in many other countries.

We know that our code has technical debt, and often we fight a battle with project managers and business people over whether we should spend time paying down that technical debt or developing new features. We certainly can do both, but often that's not a choice we are given. If we do get the chance to reduce technical debt, it's a tiny fraction of the time that is allocated to adding something new.

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