An Azure Outage
Recently the Azure service had an outage and Steve Jones has a few comments on this and why it might not be worse than your own company's IT group.
2026-09-14 (first published: 2012-03-14)
264 reads
Steve Jones
- Interests: yoga, reading, biking, snowboarding, volleyball
- Twitter: @way0utwest
- Website: https://www.voiceofthedba.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/way0utwest
- Bluesky: way0utwest.bsky.social
- Threads: @way0utwest
I Don't Want To Do XX
This Friday Steve is looking for those things you wish you didn't have to handle at work. Let us know what tasks you avoid and would rather hand off to others.
2026-09-11
94 reads
2026-09-11
1,495 reads
The Book of Redgate: Hours
I have said and written this many times: Redgate Software is the type of company I’d want to build if I founded another company. It’s a great place, and...
2026-09-11
78 reads
Updating the Data API Builder
I was updating my session for the Data API Builder (DAB) recently, mostly to work with the MCP server capabilities. As I was trying to get this working, I...
2026-09-11 (first published: 2026-09-02)
277 reads
Architecting Power BI Solutions in Microsoft Fabric
Business Intelligence (BI) tools like Power BI are used by a wide range of professionals, creating diverse and complex scenarios, and finding the right solution can be daunting, especially when multiple approaches exist for a single use case. The author distills his 17 years of experience on various data platform technologies in this book to walk you through various Power BI usage scenarios.
2026-09-09 (first published: 2025-05-27)
5,841 reads
2026-09-09
1,355 reads
The Costs of Multiple Platforms
Lots of organizations use multiple database platforms. Steve notes there is a cost to choosing to allow this.
2026-09-09
153 reads
Using the SIGN() Function: #SQLNewBlogger
I was trolling the docs and noticed the SIGN() function. I have never written this in production code, but it is an interesting function. This post looks at where...
2026-09-07 (first published: 2026-08-26)
479 reads
2026-09-04
1,485 reads
Blogs
Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference — Barcelona 2026
By James Serra
Microsoft shared a broad set of Fabric, Power BI, and SQL updates at FabCon...
Au Revoir for now
By Steve Jones
No, I’m not quitting or retiring. Just going on vacation, but I leave tonight...
Forums
Let's Talk Certifications
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Let's Talk Certifications, which is...
The Hidden Security Risks of Role Combination in SSAS Tabular
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Hidden Security Risks of...
The Empty Aggregate
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Empty Aggregate
Question of the Day
The Empty Aggregate
I have this table in a SQL Server 2025 database:
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CustomerOrder] ( [OrderID] [int] NULL, [CustomerID] [int] NULL, [total] [money] NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GOWhat is returned from this code? (answers are for the sum and then the count)
SELECT SUM(total) AS sum,
COUNT(total) AS count
FROM dbo.CustomerOrder;
See possible answers