Car Update September 2026

Software is hard. While I love our Lucid Gravity, I realize that they are behind Tesla with software. A few of the weird UX and software engineering decisions they’ve...

How to Check TDE Progress and Elapsed Time in SQL Server

How to Check TDE Progress and Elapsed Time in SQL Server

Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) protects SQL Server data and log files while they are stored...

T-SQL Tuesday #202 SQL Server Outage You’ll Never Forget: A Roundup

When I put together the invitation for T-SQL Tuesday #202, I wasn't sure what kind of stories would come out of it.
The topic was simple:
That one SQL Server outage...

Microsoft Tools for Making Data AI-Ready

Making Data AI-Ready, Part 2 (This is the second article in a three-part series on making data AI-ready. Part 1 covered the fundamentals of AI-ready data, this article looks...

Local Models Using GPUs with Ollama

Can you use your GPUs when running a local model under Ollama? You can, and it really depends on how you run Ollama and what your hardware is. Ollama...

Part 3 of 3: Tuning DiskANN — R, Alpha, L, Beam Width, Recall and Latency

In Part 1, we saw how ‘Vamana’ represents vectors as nodes, connects them with edges, and uses greedy graph traversal to avoid comparing a query against every vector in...

PostgreSQL Support in the Data API Builder

Next week I’m at VS Live in San Diego (register and join me) and one of my talks is on the Data API Builder. I want to show how...

Creating a Custom SQL Server Security Checklist Using the DoD STIG

The STIG is detailed, which is a good thing, but I found myself wanting something a little more practical for day-to-day DBA work. Something I could open, work through...

Don’t Fear the Technology

The concern that a particular technology is going to destroy the world seems to be an ever present fear. The technology changes but the fear and the marketing around...

Automated SQL Server Benchmarking with HammerDB and Docker: A Complete Testing Framework

I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates HammerDB benchmarking for SQL Server using Docker. If you’ve ever needed to run TPC-C or...