First dabblings with APEXlang
Obviously there are plenty of folks in the Oracle APEX team with waaaayy more experience in APEXlang than I have, so this isn’t an in-depth expose into all of...
2026-05-27
62 reads
Blog Posts
PowerShell Newbie – Variables
This is Week 2 of PowerShell Strikes Back – a four-week May series for SQL Server DBAs who have dabbled in PowerShell but never stopped to nail down the...
2026-05-27 (first published: 2026-05-11)
665 reads
VPN + SQL Server Connections: Why Long-Working Setups Suddenly Fail with Msg 10054 and “Connection Broken”
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been contacted by multiple customers experiencing the same frustrating issue. Applications and SSMS sessions that had been rock-solid for years suddenly started throwing...
2026-05-27 (first published: 2026-05-07)
378 reads
Claude Desktop
Claude is more than a chat window. The desktop experience includes structured workspaces, generated outputs, integrations, execution capabilities, memory and reusable workflows. This is a quick introduction to some...
2026-05-26
42 reads
The end of an era – why I chose not to renew my MVP
Two years ago, two things happened within a few days of each other. I retired from 3Cloud going on full time disability due to ALS, and I was awarded...
2026-05-26
56 reads
Claude.ai vs Claude API
You have used Claude. But which Claude? The Claude app (claude.ai, the desktop and mobile apps) is the chat product you talk to. The Claude API is the developer...
2026-05-25 (first published: 2026-05-13)
474 reads
Crash-Consistent Snapshot Cloning - Hyper-V Edition
If you’ve been following my T-SQL Snapshot Backup series, most of what I’ve covered requires SQL Server to participate in the snapshot: the write IO freeze, the metadata backup,...
2026-05-25 (first published: 2026-05-08)
184 reads
PostgreSQL: Diagnosing and Fixing a Sequential Scan with No Filter Predicate
A sequential scan is not always a problem — PostgreSQL's planner often chooses one correctly for small tables or queries that return most of a table's rows. The dangerous...
2026-05-25
708 reads
AWS RDS Aurora - our first approach
When starting with AWS RDS Aurora for managing relational databases in the cloud, many data engineers face the challenge of leveraging its cutting-edge features while maintaining performance and reliability....
2026-05-22 (first published: 2026-05-04)
187 reads
Data Engineering Books Worth Having on Your Shelf (or your tablet)
Good documentation gets you started. Good books get you deep. After years of working with cloud data platforms, SQL engines, and machine learning pipelines, a handful of titles keep...
2026-05-22 (first published: 2026-05-13)
403 reads
Blogs
T-SQL Snapshot Backups on Availability Group Secondary Replicas
One of my favourite features of SQL Server 2022 was the T-SQL Snapshot Backups....
The Book of Redgate: Hours
By Steve Jones
I have said and written this many times: Redgate Software is the type of...
How to Check TDE Progress and Elapsed Time in SQL Server
By SQLPals
How to Check TDE Progress and Elapsed Time in SQL Server ...
Forums
Squared Values
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Squared Values
I Don't Want To Do XX
Comments posted to this topic are about the item I Don't Want To Do...
Managing Feature Flags with GET_BIT() and SET_BIT() in SQL Server
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Managing Feature Flags with GET_BIT()...
Question of the Day
Squared Values
What happens when I run this code in SQL Server 2022?
SELECT SQUARE('12') See possible answers