We took advantage of the quiet days between holidays to look back on the year past and thank our users and customers for their support in 2021 - and wish you a very happy 2022!

An email recently came to our team (the Redgate Advocates) asking us what we thought the key challenges for data professionals might be in 2022. Kathi Kellenberger, Steve Jones and I each answered independently. We all bring different experiences and thoughts to the table, yet we all came up with three common themes. Here is what we all feel is likely to be of the most importance this year.

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.

We are living in a data world. Data describes and controls almost every aspect of our life, from the president's elections to everyday grocery shopping. Data grows exponentially and so does the complexity of applications that manage that data. We all know the recent shift to microservices and other revolutionary changes that happened in the way we design, develop, deploy and operate modern applications.

Aiven is thrilled to announce that it now supports Apache Cassandra 4.0. This is the first major version upgrade since Apache Cassandra 3.0 was released in 2015.

Data professionals—whether they’re database administrators (DBAs), developers, or data scientists—work in a wide and varied landscape usually in flux and filled with challenges. These challenges could range from changing business requirements to keeping up with the sheer velocity at which technology evolves.

Using recursive queries? Check out the new SEARCH and CYCLE features available in PostgreSQL 14.

In a previous post in the backup and restore series, How to Restore Databases From Native SQL Server Backups, Tim mentioned some more advanced options when restoring a database backup, including performing point-in-time recovery of a SQL Server database (sometimes known as PITR). In this tutorial, I’ll build on the information in Tim’s post by showing you how to use backups to perform point-in-time recovery and a more advanced way to determine an exact point to restore to.

With all the hustle and bustle of hospitals, hard-working staff, and extensive cutting-edge equipment, we often forget about the invisible infrastructure that underpins our healthcare institutions. They all rely on the backbone of databases, and quick access to the data housed within them, to ensure systems at the front-end run seamlessly.