Automation is often portrayed as a scary thing. Whether it’s artificially intelligent robots conquering the planet or a world where no one can find work because automatons have taken everyone’s jobs, movies and entertainment often paint automation with a horror brush. But IT pros know this isn’t the reality. They know automation is a tool capable of making their lives easier and helping their organizations run smoothly. Still, many IT pros fear automation for legitimate reasons.

One of the most fundamental concepts in any relational database management system (RDBMS), such as SQL Server, is the transaction. During my consulting career, I've seen many performance problems caused by developers not understanding how transactions work in SQL Server. In this tutorial, I'll explain what transactions are, why they're necessary, and how they work in SQL Server.

The term DevOps has taken the IT world by storm. Though every business incorporates DevOps practices differently—and even defines the term differently—doing so can offer businesses several benefits. In this article, we’ll talk about the advantages DevOps practices offer, the different parts of the organization they can help, and the future of DevOps.

Government IT administrators manage several different types of operations. There’s DevOps, which led to the creation of DevSecOps. Now, data-driven agencies are being introduced to a new operational concept: DataOps, the bridge connecting IT operations and data sciences and accelerating the use of data analytics.

Data is the lifeblood of businesses, and protecting it is incredibly important. One of the ways DBAs help ensure the continuous availability of data is through database backups, a process involving copying the data and schema from a database and saving them elsewhere for retrieval later. But like any other process in IT, database backups have costs, benefits, and risks associated with them.

How do you know your SQL Server system is running well? Is it the simple method of noting no one is complaining? (Sadly, in many businesses, this is exactly how it's done.) The fact is, if you're not monitoring SQL Server performance, you don't know.

Recently, I wrote an article titled Life Cycle Monitoring: Why an Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of a Cure. The great Benjamin Franklin coined the term. In the article, I highlighted the value, efficiency, and logic of putting more time into a proper capacity planning and optimization process for all types of IT environments. Most IT professionals would tell you the first thing that comes to their mind when asked how they use log management tools is troubleshooting.

Consider this scenario. Pull up your bank’s website and find the screen showing how much money is in your bank account. It takes 30 seconds to return the balance. You’re a bit annoyed at not having your balance immediately, and upon reflection, you think it might be a bit low, and hit refresh in case you misread the number. It comes back 45 seconds later with a different number. You know you haven’t had any transactions in the last minute. Uh oh. Something’s not right.

For many federal employees, the workplace has shifted from a traditional office setting to being at home—in a kitchen, bedroom, basement, or any spare desk in the house. With a physical workplace transformation of this nature, cybersecurity concerns come to the forefront. While most agencies have been diligent in addressing these concerns, how has your agency planned to secure its physical inventory?

Silos in IT should be a construct of the past. Tight, rigid, and insulated IT silos were an unintentional design flaw of many IT organizations worldwide over the last few decades. Corporate teams would work on their respective piece of the puzzle in isolation, actively completing their tasks, but having little to no input or conversation on how their output contributed to the greater good. When you lay out the flow, it looks something like Figure 1.