James Phillips is a Sr. Consultant with Pragmatic Works and has been working with SQL Server since version 6.5. James lives in Northwest New Jersey with his wife Amy and has 4 children: Hannah, Lillian, John and James Jr. He has spoken at several SQL Saturday events over the past few years and is the Leader of the PASS New Jersey SQL Server User group. His focus is mainly on SQL Server Performance as well as SSIS and SSAS technologies.

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Blogs

Advice I Like: Knots

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Learn how to tie a bowline knot. Practice in the dark. With one hand....

Shifting Mindsets: Why FinOps is Essential for Cloud Efficiency

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As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...

March 2026 SQL Server Security Updates

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On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...

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Multiple Deployment Processes

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Deployment Processes

How to Use sqlpackage to Detect Schema Drift Between Azure SQL Databases

By Kunal Rathi

Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Use sqlpackage to...

Upgrading Admin Queries

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Upgrading Admin Queries

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Question of the Day

Upgrading Admin Queries

I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?  

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