Going Native with Fabric Spark Pools: The Fabric Modern Data Platform
The next installment of the Fabric Modern Data Platform looks at Spark pools for executing code.
2026-03-11
1,828 reads
Articles
Getting Started with mssql-python for Data Developers
rogrammatic interaction with SQL Server or Azure SQL from a Python script is possible using a driver. A popular driver has been pyodbc that can be used standalone or with a SQLAlchemy wrapper. SQLAlchemy on its own is the Python SQL toolkit and Object Relational Mapper for developers. In the end of 2025 Microsoft released v1 of their own Python SQL driver called mssql-python. How do you get started using mssql-python for programmatic access to your SQL Server?
2026-03-11
Designing Delta Tables with Liquid Clustering: Real-World Patterns for Data Engineers
Get a short introduction to Liquid Clustering in Databricks.
2026-03-09
3,066 reads
Fun with JSON
Last year, I used a lot of JSON to exchange data between systems. There are several ways to extract data from a JSON file, but there is one specific, probably less-used possibility that I’d like to highlight. For one project, I received JSON files containing a variable number of parameters and their values. If I […]
2026-03-09 (first published: 2026-02-18)
4,944 reads
SQL Server Long-Running Query Detection: How to Find and Monitor Slow Queries
Monitoring and alerting can be overwhelming tasks, especially for those new to the world of managing production data. One common challenge for any data professional is the identification and management of queries that run for longer than they should.
2026-03-09
Metadata Driven Pipelines (Incremental Load): The Fabric Modern Data Platform
This article will use the incremental data load pattern to load data in our raw zone tables.
2026-03-07 (first published: 2025-12-10)
1,283 reads
Supervised versus Unsupervised Training of an Artificial Neural Network
Supervised training of an artificial neural network entails training the network to associate defined patterns with specified labels. Optical Character Recognition is an example of supervised training, where each input pattern is mapped to an alphanumeric character. In unsupervised training, a neural network learns to extract recurring patterns from noisy data. One of the earliest […]
2026-03-06
1,227 reads
How to Help Copilot Encourage Good Database Standards
I know a lot of y’all lag behind on upgrading SSMS, but v22.3 just introduced something that you need to be aware of. It’s going to impact any of your users who DO upgrade their SSMS, or who use Github Copilot. There’s something that you can do in order to improve Copilot’s code quality and make it match your preferred coding standards.
2026-03-06
2026-03-04
3,502 reads
Find Duplicate Rows in SQL Server with a CTE
This tip demonstrates how find and list allf duplicate rows in a dataset using a Common Table Expression (CTE).
2026-03-04
Blogs
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...
A Last Minute Trip to the EU
By Steve Jones
My life has some crazy travel stretches for sure. Between speaking, office visits, customer...
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...
Forums
Server-Level Table sizes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Server-Level Table sizes
Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...
Question of the Day
ORDER BY alias
There is a table tmp_tab:
CREATE TABLE tmp_tab ( id int, val int );
INSERT INTO tmp_tab VALUES (1, 1), (2, NULL), (3, 3), (4, 4), (5, 5);You want to order the rows ids by the following expression:
ISNULL(val, id) + 1Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct) See possible answers