Databases and AI Agents

As part of my wider work exploring Claude Code and AI-assisted database engineering, I have been looking at how AI can support SQL Server operations. A failed job, missed...

PowerShell Strikes Back: Return of the Loop

Welcome back to PowerShell Strikes Back. We’re three weeks in, and the training is paying off. In Week 1, we learned that quotes are not interchangeable. In Week 2,...

UNION vs UNIONALL: #SQLNewBlogger

While writing another post I realized my UNION query didn’t work as one might initiall expect, so I decided a short post was worth writing. This is based on...

Deciphering Data Architectures Is Now Available in Multiple Languages

Since the release of my book Deciphering Data Architectures: Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh, I’ve been fortunate to hear from readers...

T-SQL Tuesday #199 Invitation: Back to on-prem?

It’s time for T-SQL Tuesday again! And we’re almost to number 200! T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly community blogging event started by Adam Machanic in 2009. Each month a...

A Fabric solution can be very cost effective

Are you currently using Microsoft Fabric or considering migrating to it? If so, there are a couple of options to significantly reduce your monthly running costs. Firstly, there’s the...

Using T-SQL Snapshot Backup - Hyper-V Edition

If you’ve been following my T-SQL Snapshot Backup series, you’ve seen this technique work on bare-metal and standard VM deployments where database files live on volumes directly presented to...

Claude Context Window

Every Claude conversation has a context window. It is the total amount of text Claude can work with in a single chat — your messages, its replies, uploaded files,...

Creating a Pulsing Conducting Baton - Part 1

Train Wreck
The last time I watched a high school band nearly fall apart mid-performance was when the relatively new, certainly nervous band director started the piece off much faster...

Track SQL Server Configuration Changes Using the Error Log

Track SQL Server Configuration Changes Using the Error Log

If you work with SQL Server long enough, you or someone will eventually want to know, “Did...