Advice I Like: Lots of Ideas
“A multitude of bad ideas is necessary for one good idea” – from Excellent Advice for Living Whenever we read about the success of someone or something, we often...
2026-09-04
37 reads
Blog Posts
Building a DBA Agent for Your SQL Server Estate with MCP
Yesterday I gave a talk for MSSQLTips called “Building a DBA Agent for Your SQL Server Estate”. I’ll drop the recording into this post once it’s published. What I...
2026-09-04
42 reads
Measuring RAG Solutions: Are We Retrieving the Right Information?
A RAG pipeline that answers questions in the demo is not the same thing as a RAG pipeline that answers them correctly. The gap between the two only shows up...
2026-09-04
29 reads
The Book of Redgate: Evidence
We aren’t the only company that does this, but Redgate Software does try to be data driven. Across my 18 years, I’ve had plenty of people use evidence from...
2026-09-04 (first published: 2026-08-21)
205 reads
T-SQL Tuesday #201 Round-Up: Temp Tables, Friend or Foe?
The T-SQL Tuesday #201 round-up: nine bloggers on whether temp tables are a friend or a foe, from full-throated defenses to a lab built to prove me wrong.
2026-09-04 (first published: 2026-08-25)
57 reads
10 Things I Hate About Fabric Deployment Pipelines— And Some Alternatives
Fabric deployment pipelines look like they solve CI/CD for Fabric content, especially for people who prefer a GUI over writing code to handle deployments, but the implementation has enough...
2026-09-02 (first published: 2026-08-21)
363 reads
Keeping Redshift System Table History Past 7 Days with S3 Tables
Redshift keeps its SYS_* monitoring views for seven days in cluster, which is fine until an auditor or an incident review asks for something older. Until now the usual...
2026-09-02
30 reads
The GO Barrier: Why SSMS Multi-Server Query Waits for the Slowest Connection
I deployed a schema change to 30 servers using multi-server query and deploy-at-low-priority. Small servers with zero activity showed no progress, and then all 30 finished at the same...
2026-09-02 (first published: 2026-08-23)
232 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...
2026-09-02
64 reads
T-SQL Tuesday #202 Invitation: That One SQL Server Outage You’ll Never Forget
I am excited to host T-SQL Tuesday for the first time. I want to hear about that one outage that stands out in your memory. We all have incidents...
2026-09-01
128 reads
Blogs
PostgreSQL Support in the Data API Builder
By Steve Jones
Next week I’m at VS Live in San Diego (register and join me) and...
Ten Years of PowerShell
Ten years ago today, I filmed a Pluralsight Play by Play on open source...
T-SQL Tuesday #202: 100 Hours
By Steve Jones
It’s time for T-SQL Tuesday again and this is a great prompt to start...
Forums
Databricks Genie Spaces for SQL Analysts: Natural Language Querying Without Leaving Your Data Platform
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Databricks Genie Spaces for SQL...
The Costs of Multiple Platforms
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Costs of Multiple Platforms
RegEx Functions II
Comments posted to this topic are about the item RegEx Functions II
Question of the Day
RegEx Functions II
I have this data in a table in a SQL Server 2025 database:
EmailAddressID EmailAddress 7 dylan0@ADVENTURE-WORKS.COM 8 Diane1@ADVENTURE-WORKS.COMIf I run this query, which row(s) are returned?
SELECT top 10 * FROM person.EmailAddress WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(EmailAddress, '^d') AND BusinessEntityID IN (7,8)See possible answers