Taking SQL art from shamrocks and Easter eggs to something your DBA manager might actually care about. If you've been following my SQL spatial art series — shamrocks, Easter eggs, Christmas trees — you'll know I have a habit of finding increasingly creative misuses for SQL Server's geometry data type. Most of them have been […]
2026-06-12
1,595 reads
In this article, learn how PostgreSQL powers data science workflows, including query execution, performance optimization, indexing, data retrieval, and more.
2026-06-12
SQL Saturday Austin 2026 is coming on Jun 27, 2026. A free day of networking, training, and inspiration. Register today and come spend a day with your peers.
2026-06-12
You might notice that the advice you get from Copilot in SSMS isn’t very good, but it isn’t necessarily AI in general. Part of the problem is something specific about SSMS Copilot and the way it prompts LLMs, and I wish I could tell you exactly what it is, but I can’t because I don’t have access to how SSMS is changing your prompts.
2026-06-10
This article shows how you can generate embeddings in SQL Server 2025, store them, and use them in your queries.
2026-06-08
1,759 reads
In this Simple Talk opinion piece, Microsoft certification veteran Dr Greg Low considers – and shares his thoughts on – the recent announcement that many role-based Microsoft certifications are being retired.
2026-06-08
2026-06-05 (first published: 2026-05-06)
1,875 reads
Introduction When developers first learn SQL aggregation, they usually start with the GROUP BY clause. It works well for summary reports because it combines multiple rows into a single result for each group. For example, you can calculate total sales per region or average salary per department. The limitation of GROUP BY appears when you […]
2026-06-05
3,200 reads
Data build tool (dbt) is an open-source command line tool that helps engineers transform data using SQL scripts. However, there are limitations to what can be done with the Structure Query Language (SQL). That is where dbt Python models can be used to perform complex tasks. A dbt Python model is a function that reads […]
2026-06-03
2,189 reads
I got a new laptop recently and instead of installing SQL Server, I decided to try and use containers to see how well this works. This article looks at how I got this working relatively quickly. The short list of things I did is: Install Docker Desktop Create a location for data/logs/etc. Create a docker-compose […]
2026-06-02 (first published: 2024-09-06)
6,933 reads
By Arun Sirpal
Fourth in a series on Ai and databases. What Read-Only Advisory Actually Means A...
By DataOnWheels
This is a blog that I am writing for future me and hopefully it’ll...
By Steve Jones
While wandering around the documentation looking for some Question of the Day topics, I...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Pro SQL Server Internals
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL ART: Who's Blocking Who?...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Running SQLCMD II
I run this command to start SQLCMD:
sqlcmd -S localhost -E -c "proceed"At the prompt, I type this (the 1> and 2> are prompts):
1> select @@version 2> goWhat happens? See possible answers