What's a Lot of Money?

Handling a budget can be an interesting experience for many technical professionals. Today Steve wonders if you treat this differently than your budget at home.

Black Friday Wishes

Today Steve asks if there are things you might wish your employer would do for you this holiday season.

The API Battle

A legal case on the copyright possibilities for APIs has Steve worried.

What Makes a Good Programmer

Are top notch programming skills innate or can they be learned? Janet Wong takes a look at the skills and capabilities of great programmers in this essay.

The Role of the DBA Related to Insider Threats and Regulatory Complian

This article deals specifically with insider threats to IT describing how IT professionals are implementing the necessary products, policies, and procedures to reduce insider threats and provide the necessary reporting for regulatory compliance.

The Data Warehouse DBA

We have hosted a number of articles on various aspects of being a DBA, but we have usually focused on production or development DBA. New data warehousing DBA Janet Wong brings us a look at another type of DBA, the data warehouse DBA and the skills they need.

The CV Detectives

You may find this shocking, but some IT people lie on their CV. Richard Morris offers a rare glimpse into the dark underworld of the people tasked with rooting out the CV fraudsters.

SQL Server and .NET Training and Career Development

In the past, it was common for an employer to work with their employees and pay to keep their skills current. While this still happens, in this age of high employee (and employer) turnover, many companies are more circumspect about how much they will spend to keep their employees keep up-to-date. At the end of the day, it is your responsibility to make sure this happens and there are many good reasons why you should strive to do so and many ways in which you can do it.

Loving to Hate the Data Administrator

You can just hear it now: At the table down the hall, there’s a group of people having, (as it seems to you) yet another academic discussion on the merits of third-normal form and the structure of primary keys. You’ve heard many discussions like this before — it all seems so pointless. After all, doesn’t it just boil down to “create table” commands and a bunch of DDL? You mastered all that in your first DBA class. What could be so hard?

Software patents: stupid or insane?

Lest the headline mislead you as to my biases, I consider software patents to be both stupid and insane. I raise this issue because it is currently rearing its ugly mug in the world of open source software, but it has affected much development in the proprietary worlds of Windows as well.

First of all, patent laws were created long ago, which is not to say the thinking was correct then either, but we have to recognize the intellectual and technological climate back then.