11 Oct 2021
By Bob Pusateri
Presenting at PASS Data Community Summit 2021!

Presenting at PASS Data Community Summit 2021!

Community, PASS Summit
It's that time of year again - the air is cold and that means it's once again time for PASS Summit. It really doesn't feel like a year has passed! While the pandemic once again means that the summit will be virtual, I'm still looking forward to the opportunities to present and (virtually) meet up with old friends and hopefully make some new ones too! Session I'm proud as punch of my new session this year, entitled Recovering With Minimal Impact - Advanced Database Restore Methods. Here's the abstract: For mission-critical databases, backups are only half the battle – restores…
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22 Sep 2021
By Bob Pusateri
Thoughts On Getting Promoted in Tech

Thoughts On Getting Promoted in Tech

Thoughts
I'm now at the point where I have over 15 years of full-time employment since I graduated college. Yikes! There are so many measures that can be used to judge the career growth I've had over that time, and I'm confident that by all of them, I am doing a pretty awesome job. But one piece of career growth that I've never gotten from any employer is a promotion. Allow me to define "promotion". In my mind, a promotion is where an employee earns a change in job title with commensurate increase in responsibility. I won't even say it has…
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05 May 2021
By Bob Pusateri
How I Digitally Capture Videotapes

How I Digitally Capture Videotapes

Video Conversion
For the past few years I have had an ongoing project to preserve all my family's old home movies. This has involved a deep dive into understanding videotapes, VCRs, and video capture technologies that I never thought I would do, but I feel it's necessary to get the highest quality copies of everything I can before these tapes and their contents degrade further. Every once in a while I get asked how I do this and what tools I use, and this time I decided I'm going to blog about it. So thank you, Kendal, for asking! What do you…
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02 Feb 2021
By Bob Pusateri

Video and Questions from my EightKB session!

Speaking
I was extremely fortunate to be able to present about data compression at the EightKB SQL Server internals conference last week. If you missed my talk in person, you can now view it, as well as the entire day, on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5BxRvY8sfQ&list=PLr9ab4Dj3Obtx-6v2Sxb-sExQJoEX1TJ2 I was able to answer many questions during the session, but there were a few still left after time ran out. I wanted to address them all, so here they are! With row compression, is the overhead in terms of latency noticeable? I'd argue it's not noticeable. Back when the feature was new in 2008 it was typically…
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07 Dec 2020
By Bob Pusateri
What Is A SQL Server Big Data Cluster?

What Is A SQL Server Big Data Cluster?

SQL Server
SQL Server Big Data Clusters (BDCs) are a highly anticipated feature of SQL Server 2019, but what are they - and how can their capabilities best be leveraged? Let's dig a little deeper and find out. When SQL Server 2017 added support for Linux, the groundwork was laid for integrating SQL Server with Spark, HDFS, and other big data tools which are typically Linux-based. Big Data Clusters in SQL Server 2019 delivers on these integration possibilities and allows for both relational data and big data to be easily combined and analyzed. Big Data Clusters leverage enhancements to PolyBase in SQL…
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