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.

Many years ago, in my earliest IT jobs in Omaha, Nebraska, I realized the field of data was going to continue to evolve and, as such, there would always be a need for people who worked with and understood data. Regardless of which industry someone worked in—financial, medical, governmental, transportation, or retail—someone would have to work with and maintain business data, or the business would fail. This realization led me into the world of databases and SQL Server.

Perhaps because so few of us have been able to travel recently, or perhaps because wanderlust is just good fun, we’ve been wondering as to where the best place to live is as a DBA. And not just where pays the most, or where the opportunities are, but where would truly be the best place to live day-to-day. Some of the findings might surprise you! If you live in any of the places mentioned, we’d love to hear about your experience of living there in a comment below.

Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL database that scales automatically with load and supports multiple APIs. This makes it easy to incorporate with your applications while removing the need to maintain your own database servers. The Cosmos DB integrated cache—which is now in public preview—is a new offering that can help reduce costs and improve performance for Azure Cosmos DB.

A relational database management system (RDBMS)—often referred to as a SQL database because of the Structured Query Language (SQL) used to interact with it—has long been the gold standard for storing transaction-based data. Since the 1970s, RDBMSs have been used to store bank transactions, stock trades, inventory management, and more.

Earlier this year, we surveyed over 5,700 global IT professionals and asked them what the most pressing challenges they faced in Database DevOps and Monitoring are. We also asked specific questions to gauge what trends we could spot in the industry and compared the responses to the last 3-5 years of data we have.

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a workflow orchestration service used mostly for data integration and transformation. It was first released as part of SQL Server 2005 and continues to receive updates and new features today. While SSIS can be installed and run on a server (on-premises or in the cloud), it’s also available in Azure Data Factory. SSIS is commonly used to perform tasks such as: While SSIS originally only ran on Windows, it has also been available for Linux since 2017.