Happy Surprises in Snowflake
As I’ve been learning about Snowflake, at least once a week, I find small things in the SQL or feature set that just make me happy. I really feel like Snowflake is meant for someone who loves SQL, but also…
Application-Level Sharding
There are many ways to scale databases. One I was less familiar with before my last job is application-level sharding. While there are tools that work on some platforms to help you achieve application-level sharding (like Vitess with MySQL), the…
What is Snowflake?
Disclaimer: this article is only my opinions. I do not represent Snowflake. I realized after writing last week’s article that some people might be like me a few months ago, and not really understand what Snowflake is and how it…
A Few Interesting Things About Snowflake
Disclaimer: I’ve recently become a Snowflake employee, but this post is speaking of my own personal opinions, and in no way represents Snowflake. I certainly do not speak for the company. I am just a few weeks into learning about…
My New Direction: Snowflake!
I am so excited about the new job that I’m starting on July 5th! I’m joining the Field CTO office at Snowflake as a Principal Architect, Data Performance. In this role, I’ll be tackling the thorniest performance issues that clients…
Db2 Basics: Table Spaces
Table spaces are one of the more powerful tools in Db2 that are largely invisible. We used to have to spend a lot more time on table space management. Basics and Terminology Some of the terms here are rarely needed…
The Job Hunt So Far, and Thanks for the Support!
There is a part of me that just wants to spill everything about my job search in blog entries and LinkedIn posts. Some of this would be valuable information for readers, and it would certainly be cathartic for me. However,…
Differences Between Db2 and MySQL
With a year of fairly extensive MySQL experience under my belt, and uncertainty as to which exciting direction my career will take me next, I wanted to take a moment to write about some of the differences between Db2 and…
Db2 One Way Hashing as a Data Masking Solution
Database performance is heavily influenced by data volume and cardinality (or how unique that data may be). It’s interesting to watch the look on someone’s face when this concept clicks. There is a look of understanding from a developer when…
Unexpected Career Turn
It’s amazing that I’ve had a 22-year career in tech, and until last week, I had never been laid off. Last week, I was a victim of the 20% layoffs at Shopify. Along with me came very talented people with…
MySQL: Quotation Marks
My article on DB2 Basics: Quotation Marks has 962 views so far this year, so I thought it might be time to write a similar article on using quotation marks with MySQL. General quotation marks For the most part, you…
Scaling Relational Databases
“Relational databases don’t scale!”. This is the claim that database experts have heard over and over again, and yet we spend our careers scaling databases. I immediately translate this in my head to either “I threw hardware at the problem…