IDUG News and Blogs

Id really like to thank Shopify for laying me off back in May. I am so much happier in this role, and already starting to feel competent, only six months in. Dont get me wrong, I have a ton to learn, but I have a core of knowledge, strategies for learning, and am enjoying applying my skills in content creation as I learn. Read the rest

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 that had just spent a solid eight hours with IBM providing feedback on Db2. Read the rest

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, including my own experiences. Read the rest

The revelation that Snowflake doesnt (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 the lack of indexes didnt scare me away from the platform for the right use cases. Read the...

Ive 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? kind of moments. Read the rest

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 Generally a dummy table is a dummy table that has exactly one row, but no data this makes it so we can select static values or...

As Ive 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 someone who does other programming. Read the rest

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 core work of this approach is not achieved at the database layer. Read the rest

Disclaimer: this article is only my opinions. I do not represent Snowflake. I realized after writing last weeks article that some people might be like me a few months ago, and not really understand what Snowflake is and how it fits into the database, data, and cloud markets. Read the rest ...

Disclaimer: Ive 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 Snowflake, and Im drinking the company kool-aid through a firehose. Read the rest