If you've spent years writing SQL for a living, you already know how this goes. Someone pings you on Teams asking, "How many active customers do we have in the Midwest this quarter?" There you are, back in the query editor, writing a JOIN you've written fifty times before. Genie Spaces in Databricks is built […]
2026-09-09
2,037 reads
Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server is designed to bring on-premises and multi-cloud SQL Server instances under centralized Azure management, but a newly documented privilege escalation technique shows how that same management workflow can be turned against the server it’s meant to protect.
2026-09-09
If you own a business application, you’re accountable for its uptime, its cost, and its performance, even if you’ve never opened SQL Server Management Studio in your life. But most guidance out there is written for DBAs, not for the people who actually make decisions about the app.
This webinar on Sept 16 is different. We’ll walk through real findings from real SQL Server environments — the kind of things that quietly cause slow page loads, failed backups, and surprise outages — and translate each one into what it actually means for you: What did it cost? What was the risk? What would you have needed to ask your team (or your vendor) to catch it sooner?
2026-09-09
tl;dr The title says it all. Prologue One of the keys to my personal learning is that, very early in my database career, I taught myself how to make lot’s of rows of Random Constrained Data in a comparatively short time. With the help of a few good folks over time, the method has been […]
2026-09-07 (first published: 2023-09-18)
5,950 reads
This guide has everything you need to know about JSON indexing in SQL Server 2025: what it is, how it works, and current limitations.
2026-09-07
See how SQL Server's Parameter Sensitive Plan optimization handles skewed parameters, how to verify dispatcher plans, and where PSP still falls short.
2026-09-04
3,489 reads
This guide covers how TRANSLATE() works, how it compares to REPLACE(), and where it falls short compared to other SQL dialects like PostgreSQL and Oracle.
2026-09-04
Learn to use DuckDB to read data from Excel and then send it to SQL Server with Python and Pandas.
2026-09-02
4,812 reads
What's the difference between SQL Server's row compression and page compression, and when does each one make sense?
2026-09-02
How a simple Extended Events session can turn you from a silent guardian to a developer’s best ally. There is an old, undeniable paradox in the life of a Database Administrator: If you do your job perfectly, nobody remembers you exist, only when you resolve problems. When queries are fast, backups are pristine, and the […]
2026-08-31
2,390 reads
The STIG is detailed, which is a good thing, but I found myself wanting...
By Steve Jones
After my session at VSLive last week, I had a few questions from the...
Referrals have never been more important in the job market. They’re no longer nice...
I have about 100 Tables that are all suffixed with _Modify. These tables record...
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If I want to know whether a number of negative, positive, or zero, what is the easiest way to get this in T-SQL?
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