The Second Career
From a well-built cockney who knew how to avoid wheel clamps, to an ex-member of an elite anti-riot unit, some of the best DBAs have a surprising diversity of skills and experiences, according to Phil Factor.
2017-02-13
103 reads
Phil Factor
- Interests: Motorbikes, Beer, gardening, conservation, Local history.
2017-01-23
119 reads
Keeping up to, and down with, Date
It is foolish to insist on reading only up-to-date books on technology. Nothing beats getting the broad perspective.
2017-01-09
83 reads
The Toolchain for the Job?
Phil Factor ponders the use of toolchains in automation, and wonders if there might not be a better way.
2016-12-19
115 reads
2016-12-05
99 reads
2016-11-21
170 reads
I can ODBC clearly now
ODBC is the closest thing we have to a universal standard for data access across platforms, applications and data sources. So why doesn't DocumentDB support it?
2016-11-07
116 reads
Teaching a dog to sing
To survive the inevitable downturns in the IT industry, Phil Factor argues that a IT manager needs to take time to maintain technical skills. It is not enough to understand development; you have to be able to do it.
2016-09-12
105 reads
Towards a Single Management Stack
Phil Factor argues that with both SQL Server and PowerShell now running on Linux, the latter becomes increasingly important in achieving the goal of a single management stack for databases across all hosting environments.
2016-09-05
69 reads
SQL Server docks in Linux
The Database Engine on the Data Platform departs for Linux. A late arrival but worthwhile, says Phil Factor.
2016-08-29
65 reads
Blogs
Why I stopped using MCP for AI coding stuff
By HeyMo0sh
Something has shifted quietly in 2026. The developers I know/respect—the ones actually shipping, not...
AI: Blog a Day – Day 5: Notebooks, Hugging face models and Fine Tuning
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 4 where we learned Encoder, Decoder, and Attention Mechanism, today we...
AI: Blog a Day – Day 4: Transformers – Encoder, Decoder, and Attention
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 3 where we covered LLM models open/closed and their parameters, Today...
Forums
Dynamic Unpivot
I have a table I didn't design that has tons of repeating groups in...
Writing as an Art and a Job
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Writing as an Art and...
String Similarity II
Comments posted to this topic are about the item String Similarity II
Question of the Day
String Similarity II
What is the range for the result from the EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY() function in SQL Server 2025?
See possible answers