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Category: Learning

Justifying Costs to Management

Published 2025-05-02 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill broaches a challenging topic:

Your systems, your data, your customer experience – they all rely on that “invisible” database engine humming along behind the scenes. And if you’re responsible for keeping it running, you need the budget to do it right.

Here’s how to make your case without getting buried in tech jargon or glazed-over stares.

Dave Wentzel has a very solid response to this in the comments. My point of emphasis is working in business terms. Think in terms of return on investment, especially if you can calculate it. That’s a real challenge for technical people because we think in terms of capabilities and don’t have much information on the practical effects of whatever it is we do all day, but figure out what your company uses for cost analysis and try to work in those terms.

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SQL Server Book Recommendations

Published 2025-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling has a list:

They are organized by author, and in no particular order of importance, quality, or anything other than how they appear on my bookshelf.

I am saddened that the $20 I sent Erik did not make it in time for my glorious book on PolyBase in SQL Server 2019 to make it on his recommendations list.

Jokes aside, you could do a lot worse than starting off with the list Erik has. There are quite a few books I’d add to that list, but the idea is not to scare people away by recommending a stack of books as tall as they are.

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Finding Oracle Blogs

Published 2025-04-04 by Kevin Feasel

Brendan Tierney theoretically makes my life easier:

A regular question I get asked is, “is there a list of Oracle-related Blogs?” and “what people/blogs should I follow to learn more about Oracle Database?” This typically gets asked by people in the early stages of their careers and even by those who have been around for a while.

You could ask these questions to twenty different (experienced) people, and you’d get largely the same answers with some variations. These variations would be down to their preferences on how certain people cover certain topics. This comes down to experience of following lots of people and learning over time.

Click through for a list of top Oracle blogs. I should probably check out some of them, though I don’t tend to do much with Oracle here. But if you do, there’s a starting point with 100 separate blogs to check out.

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T-SQL Tuesday 184 Round-Up

Published 2025-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Deborah Melkin casts a wide net:

There were a lot of themes that I noticed throughout everyone’s posts. First were the number of people who mentioned that mentoring doesn’t have to be formal or even a 1:1 relationship. Mentoring isn’t just for adults and careers, but for the next generation too. Mentoring has helped their careers or become part of a core tenant in their company and how they run their business. It’s a place to grow our community, and not just for those who look like us. We all talked about how we have grown from mentoring, not just as mentees but as mentors.

Click through for a dozen-and-a-half responses to the T-SQL Tuesday call.

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Learn from Developer Edition rather than Express Edition

Published 2024-11-15 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea learns the right way:

It’s free for non-production use

Just like SQL Server Express Edition, Developer Edition is free, but, unlike Express, it’s only free for non-production purposes (developing, testing, demoing, learning).

If you want to learn more about this, Bob Ward has a blog post that covers this in-depth and answers some questions that people tend to have about Developer Edition.

Back in the day, Developer Edition used to cost money—something like $50, so not much, but just enough to make people prefer Express Edition. Those days are long gone, however.

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Generative AI Answers: Do Not Trust, Do Verify

Published 2024-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling speaks wisdom:

Here’s what I’ve used it for with some success:

  • Creating images for Beer Gut Magazine
  • Summarizing long documents
  • Writing boilerplate stuff that I’m bad at (sales and marketing drivel, abstracts, lists of topics)

But every time I ask it to do that stuff, I really have to pay attention to what it gives me back. It’s often a reasonable starting place, but sometimes it really goes off the rails.

That’s true of technical stuff, too. Here’s where I’ve had a really bad time, and if there’s anything you know deeply and intimately, you’ll find similar problems too.

Click through for Erik’s experience. That’s pretty close to my own, and is a big part of why I refer to generative AI models as being akin to drunken interns: sure, give them assignments, but you’d better double-check every part of it.

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Tips for Developing Good Tutorials

Published 2024-10-21 by Kevin Feasel

Adron Hall shares some advice on writing a tutorial (or any kind of technical documentation):

Here’s the deal, tutorial writers: lay out ALL the prerequisites clearly at the beginning. And I mean ALL of them. Don’t assume I have jq installed for your GraphQL tutorial. Don’t assume I’m running the latest version of Python (and for the love of code, specify WHICH Python – 2.x or 3.x?).

And here’s a novel idea: how about actually telling me where to find and install these prerequisites? Give me links, give me version numbers, give me command line instructions. Assume I’m starting from scratch on a fresh machine. Because guess what? Sometimes I am!

I think that the set of tips Adron provides is aspirationally solid, meaning that there may be some things you can’t actually do but you should certainly try to do all of them. And I’m certainly not perfect at this.

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