Deciphering Data Architectures

Data fabric, data lakehouse, and data mesh have recently appeared as viable alternatives to the modern data warehouse. These new architectures have solid benefits, but they're also surrounded by a lot of hyperbole and confusion. This practical book provides a guided tour of these architectures to help data professionals understand the pros and cons of each.

• Printed book:
  • US
• Kindle book:
  • US

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?

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.

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.

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).

Python is good, but not perfect – here are 10 reasons to avoid it

Four years ago I wrote a blog on this site explaining why Python is better than C# and, arguably, most other programming languages. To redress the balance, here are 10 reasons why you might want to avoid getting caught up in Python’s oh-so-tempting coils – particularly when building large, long-lived systems.

SSMS 22 Offline Installation

Beginning with SQL Server Management Studio 21, Microsoft stopped providing the direct download package/binaries to install SSMS, instead it just downloads the SSMS installer. This installer then starts the installation of SSMS and downloads what is needed to install SSMS. Sometimes there may be a need to do an offline installation where you do not have access to the internet. In this article, we walk through the steps to do an offline install of SSMS.

SQL Server 2025 CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL and AI_GENERATE_EMBEDDINGS Commands Explained

Now that SQL Server 2025 has finally been released to the public, I was finally able to test and learn a lot about this command (named CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL), and I want to share my knowledge with you here. If you’re new to the world of AI, don’t worry, we’ll start with the basics and evolve to where this command fits in!

Microsoft Fabric and MQTT for Real-Time IoT Data Ingestion and Analytics

Microsoft Fabric is a unified platform for data integration, data engineering, real-time intelligence, and advanced analytics. Fabric is known for providing an integrated way of working with your data, connecting to many diverse types of sources and across the data landscape. How do we get started ingesting and analyzing real-time data streamed over the MQTT protocol?

I Just Don’t Understand Why You Don’t Update SSMS.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, SQL Server Management Studio was included as part of the SQL Server installer.