Blog

What is the right length of a blog post?

A question without a definitive answer. Finding opinions from authoritative sources can also be easily obscured due to search engine optimization or even the choice of words used while searching.

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Can a picture replace a text description?

Data visualization, data storytelling, and data lineage are all ways to better describe and visualize a specific situation for a set of data. Generally, I find these techniques are used as a means to uncover or identify information that ultimately pertains to individuals.

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A summer sabbatical

In recent weeks I have been sharing more informal thoughts and in the upcoming weeks, there will be a period of greater radio silence. After three decades as a professional, I am taking the entire summer off.

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Weekly Musings – July 8, 2022

A very succinct description of the responsibilities of leadership by Jawad Nagda (infographic below) shows a number of key features of management that are also needed in data storytelling such as empathy, integrity, and listening.

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Weekly Musings – June 10, 2022

A large part of my work week was spent u-hauling across 1/3 of the country. This was a very mentally intense time, indeed 8-10 hrs per day of concentration working with dangerous equipment and sometimes in unpredictable situations with little break was harder than sitting at a desk.

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Weekly Musings – June 3, 2022

This week I wanted to share more about Observability and the CNCF foundation project Open Telemetry . Observability is a necessary foundation for any information system however observability does not answer questions that are essential for a successful business to operate.

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Weekly Musings – May 27, 2022

——— We should all take a moment to reflect that going to school should be a safe, happy, and memorable part of everybody’s life. That was taken away this week from 19 children because common-sense laws, licenses, and checks do not apply to deadly weapons in this country.

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Weekly Musings – May 20, 2022

The Linux Foundation came across my reading path two separate times this week. As I continue to re-establish my larger footprint solely in the open-source ecosystem Setting an Open Source Strategy is a detailed report for any business to identify the potential return on investment (ROI) of participating in the open-source ecosystem.

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Weekly musings – May 13 2022

As I reflect on this week of my technology journey with the conversations I had, what I learned, and what I wanted to do and write about, I decided what better way to work on multiple blog posts than write about what I’d like to write about.

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SELECT 1

If you have worked with an RDBMS for some time, you will likely have come across the statement SELECT 1. However, rarely is it correctly explained to engineers what the origin of SELECT 1 is, and why it’s useless and wasteful?

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What does the MySQL mysqlsh util.checkForServerUpgrade() execute

During a recent Aurora MySQL 8 upgrade process, a number of validation checks have failed. This is an analysis of the error message “present in INFORMATION_SCHEMA’s INNODB_SYS_TABLES table but missing from TABLES table”.

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Upgrading to AWS Aurora MySQL 8

With Aurora MySQL 8 now generally available to all, you may want to consider the plan for an upgrade path if you would like to take advantage of the new features for your application, for example, Common Table Expressions (CTE).

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Reviewing your strengths and areas for improvement

The end of the year is often a time to review the progress of your yearly goals and to set new goals for the next year. These goals may include improving your professional and personal development.

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AWS Aurora MySQL 8 is now generally available

AWS has just announced the general availability of Aurora MySQL 8 compatibility (known as Aurora Version 3). This is long awaited addition to RDS MySQL 8 and provides many of the new features that can be found in the open-source MySQL 8 community version.

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