Advice I Like: Time and Focus

“You don’t need more time because you already have all the time that you will ever get; you need more focus.” – from Excellent Advice for Living Boy, I...

Car Update October 2026

This month I want to look at a few of the things I’ve seen posted about cars during the last month. These are a few headlines, as well as...

Fighting Procrastination?

Here is another short video (~ 15 minutes). This is by the author of The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg. In this video, he delves into why we procrastinate...

It’s 2026 and I’m retired, so lets get Visual Basic 6.0 to run on Windows 11

In 1999 I released my first commercial software product. ShutOff 2000 was a Windows application that could log off or shut down Windows in multiple ways. It was successful...

SQL Server 2016 Has Reached End of Support. Now What?

SQL Server 2016 Has Reached End of Support. Now What?

On July 14, 2026, SQL Server 2016 reached the end of extended support. That means regular...

SQL Server Problems You Can Reproduce, Measure and Fix: A Free Demo Library

I built a free library of runnable SQL Server demos. Each reproduces a real production problem on purpose, measures the fixes, and checks its own predictions on SQL Server...

The New Unified Copilot in Fabric and Project Osmos: From AI Assistance to Agentic Data Engineering

(This post starts a three-part series on how AI is changing the way we build solutions in Microsoft Fabric. First, we’ll explore how the new unified Copilot in Fabric...

A Pursuit of Lifelong Learning

The following came across my YouTube feed today. It’s an interview with General James Mattis, USMC, Retired, talking about lifelong learning, the expectations of learning in the Marine Corps,...

Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference — Barcelona 2026

Microsoft shared a broad set of Fabric, Power BI, and SQL updates at FabCon and SQLCon Barcelona 2026, with approximately 5,000 attendees at the conference. I’ve tried to make...

Experimenting with CHOOSE: #SQLNewBlogger

I was looking over the CHOOSE() function while editing an article at SQL Server Central. I realized there isn’t a documentation note on how many parameters can be included....