AI Helps Me with My Sloppiness
I type fairly well. Well, I type fast, but I do wear out a backspace key relatively quickly on most keyboards. That and a space bar. AI helps me...
2026-07-01
13 reads
Blog Posts
Automatic Index Compaction
Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend. Azure SQL’s new Automatic Index Compaction targets page density directly — so I tested it.
2026-07-01 (first published: 2026-06-30)
34 reads
Microsoft Build 2026 announcements
Once again there were a number of Microsoft Build announcements related to data and AI, and some were very impressive. Below are my favorites. I am prioritizing the data...
2026-07-01 (first published: 2026-06-18)
309 reads
Monday Monitor Tips: Virtual Machine Usage and Cost
One of the things I’ve been requesting for a number of years is cost information. I could see this coming in 2015 with the move to the cloud and...
2026-07-01 (first published: 2026-06-29)
18 reads
Setting Up a Mac for Data Engineering and AI Work
If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac with Apple Silicon is genuinely one of the best machines you can have as a...
2026-07-01 (first published: 2026-06-25)
158 reads
Where Is My SQL Agent? Running Scheduled Jobs Against Azure SQL Database
One of the first things I review when I inherit a new SQL Server environment is the SQL Agent jobs. I can learn a tremendous amount about an organization...
2026-07-01 (first published: 2026-06-16)
386 reads
WITH clause gets a 26ai boost!
By way of background, a while back I did video called “My New Favourite Join” on the LATERAL clause. The reason I like it is that it lets you...
2026-07-01
13 reads
The Goldilocks problem – Materialized Views
I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but I’d like to apply the Goldilocks principle to a database object-namely, a materialized view. You...
2026-06-30
14 reads
5 Starter Projects for Your AI and Data Engineering Portfolio
Reading tutorials is fine. Shipping something is better. If you are trying to break into data engineering or AI, nothing on your resume carries more weight than a GitHub...
2026-06-29 (first published: 2026-06-12)
357 reads
KDA: Echoes of Deception - Case 4
Someone hacked Digitown's municipality and stole classified documents. 45 million rows of router traffic, an IP lookup table, and KQL's anomaly detection to find who did it.
2026-06-29 (first published: 2026-06-15)
140 reads
Blogs
AI Helps Me with My Sloppiness
By Steve Jones
I type fairly well. Well, I type fast, but I do wear out a...
WITH clause gets a 26ai boost!
By way of background, a while back I did video called “My New Favourite...
Automatic Index Compaction
By ReviewMyDB
Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend....
Forums
SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
How We Handled a Vendor Retry That Loaded Twice in Snowflake
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How We Handled a Vendor...
Cognitive Coverage
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Cognitive Coverage
Question of the Day
Getting the Average
I have this data in the dbo.Commission table in a SQL Server 2022 database.
salesperson commission Brian 12 Brian 16 Andy 7 Andy 14 Andy 21 Steve 20 Steve NULLAll the data is a varchar, and I decide to run this query to get the totals for each salesperson.
SELECT SalesPerson
, AVG(TRY_PARSE(Commission AS int)) AS TotalCommission
FROM commission
GROUP BY SalesPerson
GO
What average commission is calculated for Steve? See possible answers