Voice of the DBAAuthor: Steve Jones
A series of episodes that look at databases and the world from a data professional's viewpoint. Written and recorded by Steve Jones, editor of SQLServerCentral and The Voice of the DBA. Language: en Genres: News, Tech News, Technology Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Acting with Confidence
Episode 37
Thursday, 9 April, 2026
Recently, I saw a graph about making decisions that showed the impact of both reversibility and consequences. Here is an example of such a graph and how one might approach decisions. If things are easily reversible or have a low consequence, we tend to make a decision and move on. Or we are willing to make a decision. One of the examples of such a decision was choosing what to wear out to dinner. It's easy to change, and (in general) of little consequence. Choosing to send a large amount of money to someone through Venmo (or some other mechanism), can be hard to reverse and have substantial consequences. This made me think of some of the DBA and developer decisions I've made in the past. When we work with databases, the changes we make can have a large impact and be quite consequential to our organization. Downtime, data quality, etc. could all impact revenue, profit, reputation, or even future prospects of survival. That can be a lot of pressure when you are deciding to refactor a data model or adjust a lot of data during a deployment. Read the rest of Acting with Confidence









