The New Arena of LeadershipThe role of the Chief Data Officer is no longer about governance alone. It is about vision. It is about turning data into the lifeblood of strategy. Artificial intelligence is no longer a side note in the story of business. It has become the ink with which the next chapters of the enterprise are written. The CDO is now the architect of how decisions are made, how risks are managed, and how opportunities are seized.The CDO of yesterday was a custodian of compliance. The CDO of today is a commander of competitive advantage. This shift requires…
Author: drweb
After setting up dozens of Internet of Things (IoT) smart home devices, I started to wonder: how hard could it be to build one from scratch?I needed a project to learn on, so I decided to create something fun: a device that alerts my neighbors when my kids go swimming, extending the invitation for their kids to come swim too.What follows are the lessons I learned from building such an IoT device from scratch.Here’s a short video demoing the device and its features:Watch this video on YouTubeThe instructions and code for building your own Splashflag can be found at the…
Presenting you with an updated version of our sp_snapshot procedure, allowing you to easily create database snapshots.This new version fixes a bug that we’ve found in version 2 where snapshots will fail for databases with multiple data files.We’ve also added the @STMTOnly parameter, allowing you to generate the scripts for creating the required snapshots without actually doing so.Parameters@DatabaseList – a comma delimited string of database names, allows wildcards@Suffix – adds a suffix to the snapshot name, giving it the format _, DEFAULT value is ‘snapshot’@FilePath – specify a file path where the snapshot files will be saved to. If left blank, this will default…
News At JetBrains, we want the PHP community to shine. First and foremost, we do this by building PhpStorm, the best IDE for PHP development; but we also support and help drive the PHP Foundation; have just organised PHPverse, accessible for everyone worldwide; and recently we made the Laravel Idea plugin free for all. On top of that, we support open-source projects that we believe impact the PHP community or have the potential to do so, and which will benefit from our financial support. Our support includes free PhpStorm licenses for active open source maintainers, but also financial sponsorships. With…
SELECT * feels convenient, but in SQL Server it bloats I/O, burns network bandwidth, blocks covering-index usage, and makes code brittle when schemas change. Specify only the columns you need—your DBAs (and your latency) will thank you.Top 5 reasonsExtra I/O and bigger result payloadsFetching every column—including wide MAX types—moves more data from disk and across the network than needed, hurting throughput. Microsoft notes the performance implications of wide tables/rows; real-world demos also show SELECT * inflating query costs. Prevents covering indexes and triggers key lookups/scansThe optimizer can only use a covering nonclustered index (often via INCLUDE) when it knows the exact…
Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 sets a new bar for coding, agentic tasks, and computer use, with 30+ hours of autonomous operation. Early adopters report major gains in accuracy, security, and long-horizon development. With new tools and SDKs, Sonnet 4.5 marks the shift from AI as assistant to AI as a true engineering teammate.
MCP standardizes how AI agents connect to tools and data, solving fragmentation in AI development with secure, reusable, and scalable integrations.
Natural language processing (NLP) is reshaping technical documentation and developer enablement. Organizations that select the right tools and integrate them effectively into existing environments streamline documentation workflows, reduce manual effort, and make technical knowledge more accessible to developers at all levels. Unlocking the highest value from NLP tools requires organizations to adapt models to their […]
DevOps was supposed to make software delivery faster, safer and more reliable. For the most part, it has. But every so often, something nasty crawls out of the shadows and reminds us how fragile the system really is. It wasn’t a zero-day in Kubernetes or a cloud misconfiguration that caught my eye. It was a […]
At SQL Saturday Boston 2025, I gave a presentation on local LLMs and there was a great question that I wasn’t sure about. Someone asked about the download size vs the model size as listed on Hugging Face (or elsewhere). It was a good questions, and I assumed the parameter size (258M, 7B, etc.) relates to the download size or size on disk.I did a few searches and this was a great article on LinkedIn, called The Intergalactic Guide to LLM Parameter Sizes. In it, there’s a quick guide:Tiny (1-3B parameters): 1-2GB on diskSmall (4-8B parameters): 3-5GBMedium (10-15B): 8-15GBLarge (30-70B):…