The Invisible Disk

Steve sees disk drives as shrinking to the point of being invisible to most of us.

A New Word: Incidental Contact High

incidental contact high – n. an innocuous touch by someone just doing their job – a barber, yoga instructor, or friendly waitress – that you find more meaningful than...

Am I on Synapse?

Container Development Work

Steve talks about using containers for development work today.

Creating a Test Pipeline in Azure DevOps using a Windows Agent

A customer was having some trouble getting started with Azure DevOps (AzDO) and building their database, so we took a step back and decided to create a simple test...

Take the 2025 State of Database Landscape Survey

The survey is out now and you can share your experiences for a chance at $250 in Amazon vouchers. No matter whether you think your org is great or...

Using Containers to Avoid Installing SQL Server

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 […]

CONCAT NULLs

Fifty Percent

What percentage of a job's requirements should you have? Steve says fifty percent.

SQL Saturday Boston 2024 Plans

I was accepted to speak at SQL Saturday Boston 2024, which is taking place on October 5, 2024. One month away. This is a fun event that takes place...