2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-04)
483 reads
Articles
Deprecated but Forgotten: Why SQL Server’s Text, NText, and Image Data Types Still Haunt Your Systems
TEXT, NTEXT, and IMAGE columns have been deprecated for nearly two decades, yet they still silently haunt many SQL Server environments. This article explains their hidden limitations with practical demos and shows why migrating to VARCHAR(MAX), NVARCHAR(MAX), and VARBINARY(MAX) is critical for modern performance, maintainability, and future upgrades.
2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-06)
2,279 reads
How to Access and Use Azure Key Vault Secrets in an Azure Devops Pipeline
When you run a CI/CD pipeline, you often need confidential values like passwords, authentication tokens, service principal secrets etc. when you want to deploy a certain artefact. You don’t want to store those secrets directly in your pipelines as this might pose a considerable security leak. Instead, you either store them as secret variables, or […]
2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-04)
994 reads
How to create your custom GPT SQL Expert
Introduction ChatGPT includes custom GPTs. You can create your own custom GPT. In this article, we will demonstrate how to create a custom GPT expert in SQL Server. Requirements To create your own GPT, you need to use the paid version of ChatGPT. First, go to ChatGPT. Secondly, if you don’t have the paid version, […]
2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-11)
4,573 reads
How to safely and surgically restore filegroups
Most DBAs are familiar with full and differential ...
2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-01)
885 reads
Model Context Protocol (MCP): A Developer’s Guide to Long-Context LLM Integration
Large Language Models (LLMs) like Anthropic’s Cl...
2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-01)
1,078 reads
MongoDB and NodeJS in action
Overview MongoDB is a popular NoSQL database used for building modern, scalable applications. In this article, we’ll cover how to set up MongoDB on Windows and connect to it using Node.js. We will also perform some basic Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations to ensure we understand fully on how Node.js can be made […]
2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-08)
175 reads
SQL Server Threats
Is your SQL Server truly secure? Here are the top cyber threats targeting it. Learn how you can stop them before it strikes.
2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-07)
2,762 reads
Using psycopg2 to Connect Python to PostgreSQL
Learn how to connect to a PostgreSQL database from Python with this popular library.
2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-25)
1,889 reads
Why CQRS and Event Sourcing Are Gaining Ground in High-Concurrency Web Systems
In web app development company boardrooms, architects and engineers are debating old assumptions. Scaling up isn’t just about faster servers or better caching anymore. It’s about reshaping how systems think. CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) and Event Sourcing are no longer fringe ideas. They’re becoming default choices in high-concurrency systems where consistency, auditability, and performance […]
2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-06)
508 reads
Blogs
Resetting on the AI hype train
By Brian Kelley
There's a great article from MIT Technology Review about resetting on the hype of...
A New Word: Etherness
By Steve Jones
etherness – n. the wistful feeling of looking around a gathering of loved ones,...
Vibe Coding a Login Tracking System
By Steve Jones
A customer was asking about tracking logins and logouts in Redgate Monitor. We don’t...
Forums
The Microsoft SQL Year in Review
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T-SQL in SQL Server 2025: The || Operator
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Your Value from a Conference
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Your Value from a Conference
Question of the Day
UNISTR Basics
What does this code return in SQL Server 2025+? (assume the database has an appropriate collation)
SELECT UNISTR('Hello 4E16754C') AS 'A Classic';
A: 
B: 
See possible answers