Advice I Like: Lots of Ideas
“A multitude of bad ideas is necessary for one good idea” – from Excellent Advice for Living Whenever we read about the success of someone or something, we often...
2026-09-04
13 reads
Blog Posts
Building a DBA Agent for Your SQL Server Estate with MCP
Yesterday I gave a talk for MSSQLTips called “Building a DBA Agent for Your SQL Server Estate”. I’ll drop the recording into this post once it’s published. What I...
2026-09-04
7 reads
Measuring RAG Solutions: Are We Retrieving the Right Information?
A RAG pipeline that answers questions in the demo is not the same thing as a RAG pipeline that answers them correctly. The gap between the two only shows up...
2026-09-04
9 reads
The Book of Redgate: Evidence
We aren’t the only company that does this, but Redgate Software does try to be data driven. Across my 18 years, I’ve had plenty of people use evidence from...
2026-09-04 (first published: 2026-08-21)
186 reads
T-SQL Tuesday #201 Round-Up: Temp Tables, Friend or Foe?
The T-SQL Tuesday #201 round-up: nine bloggers on whether temp tables are a friend or a foe, from full-throated defenses to a lab built to prove me wrong.
2026-09-04 (first published: 2026-08-25)
50 reads
Microsoft Fabric Data Agents: Bringing Structured and Unstructured Data Together
Most enterprise questions do not live neatly in one place. The numbers may be in a warehouse, the rules may be buried in PDF files, and the explanation may...
2026-09-03
78 reads
10 Things I Hate About Fabric Deployment Pipelines— And Some Alternatives
Fabric deployment pipelines look like they solve CI/CD for Fabric content, especially for people who prefer a GUI over writing code to handle deployments, but the implementation has enough...
2026-09-02 (first published: 2026-08-21)
322 reads
Keeping Redshift System Table History Past 7 Days with S3 Tables
Redshift keeps its SYS_* monitoring views for seven days in cluster, which is fine until an auditor or an incident review asks for something older. Until now the usual...
2026-09-02
20 reads
The GO Barrier: Why SSMS Multi-Server Query Waits for the Slowest Connection
I deployed a schema change to 30 servers using multi-server query and deploy-at-low-priority. Small servers with zero activity showed no progress, and then all 30 finished at the same...
2026-09-02 (first published: 2026-08-23)
216 reads
Updating the Data API Builder
I was updating my session for the Data API Builder (DAB) recently, mostly to work with the MCP server capabilities. As I was trying to get this working, I...
2026-09-02
39 reads
Blogs
Measuring RAG Solutions: Are We Retrieving the Right Information?
A RAG pipeline that answers questions in the demo is not the same thing...
Advice I Like: Lots of Ideas
By Steve Jones
“A multitude of bad ideas is necessary for one good idea” – from Excellent...
Building a DBA Agent for Your SQL Server Estate with MCP
Yesterday I gave a talk for MSSQLTips called “Building a DBA Agent for Your...
Forums
Looking for New Blood
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Looking for New Blood
Server-Level Row Counts for Tables and Views
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Server-Level Row Counts for Tables...
Parameter Sensitive Plan Optimization vs. Parameter Sniffing: What SQL Server Fixes and What It Doesn't
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Parameter Sensitive Plan Optimization vs....
Question of the Day
Hyperscale Replicas I
What types of secondary replicas are available for the Azure SQL Database Hyperscale edition?
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