IBM, the Death Star, and rise of the Resistance. In the spring of 2018, Ember and I attended a dinner with members of the Db2 Technical Advisory Board (TAB). This was a collection of respected Db2 end-users, clients, and consultants…
There are plenty of guides to setting up a trial of Snowflake online, but as part of my “Roll for Database” series, I want to have the basics of setting up a free trial of any platform I work with,…
The revelation that Snowflake doesn’t (currently) use b-tree indexes may be shocking to some who are used to a more traditional rdbms environment. It is interesting, therefore, to walk through some of the generalities of the methodologies to understand why…
I’ve spent 20 years of my career working with IBM Db2, then a year working with MySQL, and now my database platform of choice is Snowflake. When I was moving from Db2 to MySQL, there were a number of “WTH?”…
Every database platform has a way to select from nothing. Sometimes we use it to generate data manually, sometimes we use it to get values of various system functions, but it is important to be able to do. Dummy Table…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
