The case for "Understanding our business" training
Today we have a guest editorial reminding us that business knowledge is important, and we could all use some training.
2025-11-19
148 reads
David Poole
- Interests: Badminton, Cycling and Music. Keen piano player.
Why Standards are Important
There is something in the tech mindset that simultaneously loves and loathes a standard. Having standards is important, what those standards are is less so.
2025-01-22
2,381 reads
An introduction to Terraform
As a Data Engineer I found myself having to learn rather more about cloud infrastructure than I had expected.
2024-12-02
3,770 reads
NOSQL and RDBMSs
NOSQL and RDBMS are evolving and absorbing ideas from each other. Is this necessarily a good thing? Perhaps we should think again
2024-06-14 (first published: 2015-08-27)
877 reads
JQ - Tool for Querying JSON documents using the CLI
Learn how you can query JSON data from a CLI to check it before importing the data into a database.
2024-02-16
8,570 reads
Managing Change
Time has brought clarity for changes which could and should have been provided by its instigators. We compare a change where clarity was sought to those that were chaotic and the approaches that were taken at their two poles.
2023-08-16
1,495 reads
Using pre-commit to prevent simple mistakes
Git hooks are a useful way of triggering code quality scripts. The pre-commit tool provides us with a way of doing this and tapping into the huge library of scripts already in existence to ensure our code complies with general linting and formatting good practice.
2023-01-13
6,665 reads
Design your systems and processes for auditability
I have worked in more than one regulated industry, and since the banking crisis of 2008, I have witnessed a sea change in the approach to regulation. The UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) was seen to be a toothless tiger. The UK government replaced the FSA with two separate bodies, each with its own more […]
2021-10-25
1,596 reads
PostGres and SQL Server - Divided by a common language
A few lessons from a SQL Server DBA that is working on PostgreSQL. David Poole tells us where the similarities in the platforms can cause problems.
2021-07-30
4,081 reads
Documentation. The Under Recognised Skill
Documentation may not be something we aspire to do, but it is a valuable skill.
2021-04-30
441 reads
Blogs
Narrow Task Decomposition in AI Pipeline Agents
A nightly load into sales_fact fails. Ask an orchestrating agent to break down the...
Car Update: August 2026
By Steve Jones
It’s been some time since I provided a car update, so I decided to...
Microsoft Fabric OneLake Shortcuts: When to Use Them and When Not To
By James Serra
An architecture scenario Imagine separate Sales, Finance, Shared Data, and Executive Analytics workspaces. Sales...
Forums
Searching for my own posts
I have a really stupid question... Is there an easy way to search for...
How to Work with On-Premises AI Models to Generate T-SQL Code
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Work with On-Premises...
Escaping Strings
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Escaping Strings
Question of the Day
Escaping Strings
The STRING_ESCAPE() function requires 2 parameters in SQL Server 2025. The first is a string of text and the second is the type of escape rules being used. What are the options for the second parameter?
See possible answers