PowerShell Strikes Back: A New Script
This is it. The final chapter of PowerShell Strikes Back. Over the past four weeks, you’ve built a real foundation. You know that single quotes are literal and double...
2026-05-26
96 reads
Blog Posts
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
40 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)
318 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)
102 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
208 reads
Giving AI Agents Visibility Into SQL Server with MCP
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it actually takes to make an AI agent genuinely useful for database work, both for administration and for application access to...
2026-05-24
42 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)
159 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)
353 reads
QUOTENAME Basics: #SQLNewBlogger
Recently I ran across some code that used a lot of QUOTENAME() calls. A colleague was having some trouble with the code, but what struck me was that I...
2026-05-22 (first published: 2026-05-20)
149 reads
Session Materials for Techorama & DataGrillen 2026
I’ve uploaded the slides for my Techorama session Microsoft Fabric for Dummies and my DataGrillen session Building the €100 data warehouse with the Azure Data Platform to Github. If...
2026-05-22
15 reads
Blogs
SQL Server instance metadata inventory with PowerShell and SMO
By SQLPals
SQL Server instance metadata inventory with PowerShell and SMO The purpose...
5 SQL Tricks Worth Remembering Before You Close the Laptop
Disclosure: this post may contain links to books as an affiliate link. If you...
Claude Context Window
By Arun Sirpal
Every Claude conversation has a context window. It is the total amount of text...
Forums
Celebrating 30 years of PostgreSQL, A Thank you message
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Celebrating 30 years of PostgreSQL,...
provisioning sql server via VMware Cloud Foundation
Hello, has anyone here ever provisioned and actually used an MS SQL Server with...
No More Deadlocks
Comments posted to this topic are about the item No More Deadlocks
Question of the Day
No More Deadlocks
After detecting deadlocks in SQL Server 2025 and lowering the time threshold for detecting future issues, when does the Database Engine return to the 5s default interval?
See possible answers