Rethinking Conferences and User Groups
Linkedin
March 31, 2026
Too many conferences still follow the same pattern: someone talks, everyone else listens, and real conversations happen later in the hallway, if at all. I used to call this "the other conference in the hallway." The conversations also spread to Twitter and continued for weeks after the conference. I miss the days when Twitter was useful and collaborative.
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Tags: Digital Transformation, Leadership
Storage Vendors Are Finally Speaking Data Governance and Management and I Like It
Linkedin
November 10, 2025
At NetApp Insight 2025, one announcement was particularly encouraging for the future of data management in storage solutions. NetApp’s AI Data Engine (AIDE) is a new service that helps teams get their data ready for AI. It’s built into ONTAP, their storage OS. What makes AIDE different is that it doesn’t just support storage data, It helps you find it, clean it, organize it, and use it in AI projects. That sounds a lot like the definition of data management that I use. It's not just managing files and blobs but governing actual data in those files.
What AIDE Does
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Tags: AI Infrastructure, Cloud
Why Those Shopping Extensions Should be Blocked
Linkedin
September 02, 2025
Today someone recommended I start using one of those "cashback" services that we see advertised and socially influenced everywhere. I've looked at other such services and seen similar data policies, so this post is not about the specific service I'm sharing about here.
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Tags: Big Data, Privacy, Security
Vector Search Meets Data Governance: Smarter Matching, Better Stewardship
Linkedin
August 28, 2025
Recently SQL Server 2025 (preview) and Azure SQL Database introduced vector search, but what does that really mean for your data platform? Whether you're a DBA, developer, or data modeller, this isn't just another feature drop. It's a shift in how we think about search, similarity, and AI integration in relational databases. Now you don't have to lean on complex queries and a ton of REGEX emoticons* to ask your data what it means.
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Tags: Analytics, Big Data
AI Network Data Bottlenecks: How to Spot Them Before Your GPUs Go Idle
Linkedin
July 07, 2025
As AI use accelerates, most of the attention (and budget) goes toward GPUs, model architectures, and training data. But there’s an equally important piece of the puzzle that doesn’t get nearly enough airtime: the network. Specifically, how data moves into and within AI infrastructure.
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Tags: AI, AI Infrastructure
Rethinking Conferences and User Groups
