Moser Consulting was recently tasked with reducing costs and ensuring more consistent SLA compliance in a company's Snowflake environment. While Snowflake differs from traditional and other cloud databases, it is still a SQL-based database, and many of the same tuning techniques apply. However, understanding Snowflake's architecture is crucial, as it offers unique cost-saving opportunities not found in traditional databases.

Recently, I stumbled upon a blog by Felipe Hoffa that detailed using Cloudflare R2 as the data storage location for external tables in Snowflake. I had a project that required less than 5 GB of storage per month, and I wanted to avoid paying for storage if possible. Therefore, I decided to experiment with Cloudflare's free tier as my data lake. The results were nothing short of impressive.

For the second year in a row, Snowflake has been named the Database of the Year by DB-Engines. Over the past couple of years, it has climbed the popularity rankings, currently sitting at #11. Snowflake is a cloud data platform designed for analytical, AI, and ML use cases. As a cloud-native solution, its architecture differs significantly from traditional databases like SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

We’ve heard it said “it’s a seller’s market”, but in these times, I believe we are in a “candidate’s market”. Candidates are looking for maximum benefits and flexibility from an employer and it’s competitive out there when searching for the great candidates. Afterall, if we find a candidate that fits, we want to keep them!

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Disasters can range from natural, physical, or technology-based emergencies. A disaster recovery plan can help you get back to business as usual.

A cybersecurity risk assessment can help protect your business against a cyber attack. Learn how to do one here.

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Since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis, as with most aspects of life, learning and education have had to adapt, by necessity, to remote access. In that field, Canvas-LMS (from Instructure) clearly maintains the lead position as the go-to suite for providing educational content over remote channels, be it from elementary schools up through universities and even corporate training.

Instructure does offer hosted Canvas solutions, providing turn-key access to organizations that may not have the technical staff or the same closely-held security requirements as public and private enterprises, which more likely deploy a Canvas system on local or cloud 'hardware' more directly under their control. Instructure's main support documentation describes paths to install Canvas-LMS on either MacOS (OS X) or Debian || Ubuntu-based Linux distributions. However, Canvas-LMS is a complex suite; challenging to install even for experienced Systems Administrators and Developers and requiring a narrow list of supporting framework versions that may no longer be "default" packages in the current repositories ("repos"). There are also a healthy number of un-affiliated sites with their own "how-to" on installing Canvas; but again, these are focused on Debian-based installs.

This article, though, is about the path less taken: Canvas-LMS on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. (Please watch for a future revision of this article adjusting these steps for install on either Alma or Rocky.)

Security risk assessments keep your business’s data safe from any potential threats. What are the different elements of these assessments?

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It is hightly likely that Incident Response and Disaster Recovery planning and preparation could have avoided or reduced the system outage's impact.

Data management is essential for businesses that collect and store data. What processes can you take to keep data safe and useful for your business?

As of Oct 11, 2022 Mainstream Support has ended for SQL Server 2017.

Data management, data analytics, and data analysis… together, they make up the backbone of business, driving optimization, improving workflows, and boosting return on investments.