A New Word: Etherness
etherness – n. the wistful feeling of looking around a gathering of loved ones, all too aware that even though the room is filled with warmth and laughter now,...
2025-12-19
140 reads
Blog Posts
Prepping for Certification, Part 4 of 4
In Parts 1-3, I covered how I prepare for a certification exam. In this last part, I'll talk about how I go about taking the exam.
2025-12-19 (first published: 2025-12-08)
441 reads
SQL Server – What To Do When Disaster Strikes (5-Point Survival Guide)
SQL Server – What To Do When Disaster Strikes (5-Point Survival Guide)Chill, coffee first.When your SQL Server goes down, alarms are blaring, and managers are hovering, that sentence might...
2025-12-19 (first published: 2025-12-03)
657 reads
4 CPE Opportunity (Virtual) for Charity
Every year, the South Carolina State Internal Auditors Association and the South Carolina Midlands ISACA Chapter partner together to put on a "CPE catchup" opportunity in December to provide...
2025-12-17
19 reads
Quantum Computing and SQL Server Article Is Up
In parallel with the presentation I gave at the PASS Data Community Summit on quantum computing's impact on data, I wrote an article specifically on impact with respect to...
2025-12-17 (first published: 2025-12-03)
241 reads
What’s New at AWS re:Invent 2025 – Day2 Highlights
Day 2 kicked off with Matt Garman’s keynote, and he opened with a quote that instantly stood out as my favorite of the day “Is it possible? …..Why not!...
2025-12-17 (first published: 2025-12-03)
126 reads
Data Céilí 2026 Call for Speakers!
Data Céilí 2026 Call for Speakers is now live! Data Céilí (pronounced kay-lee), is Ireland’s free, community led, Microsoft Data Platform event. We had a fantastic event this year...
2025-12-16
66 reads
Getting SQL Server 2025 RTM Running in Containers on macOS
SQL Server 2025 RTM is here, and if you’re running Docker on macOS, you might have hit a wall trying to get it running. Here’s what happened when I...
2025-12-15 (first published: 2025-11-26)
1,019 reads
Why is shrinking IT budgets a good thing?
Each year around this time, companies enter the familiar ritual of budgeting. For many, it feels like a long and exhausting negotiation between ambition and constraint. Everyone knows, it...
2025-12-15 (first published: 2025-12-02)
709 reads
Advice I Like: Art
Superheroes and saints never make art. Only imperfect beings can make art because art begins in what is broken – from Excellent Advice for Living Interesting advice for living...
2025-12-12
16 reads
Blogs
Advice I Like: Respect
By Steve Jones
“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.” –...
Setting Up a Mac for Data Engineering and AI Work
If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac...
Want to look at cloud reporting but not sure what the costs will be?
By ChrisJenkins
Have you been thinking about migrating your reporting to Microsoft Fabric or Snowflake but...
Forums
SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
locking down agent for new user on our dev machine
hi , a new user wants to be able to add sql agent jobs...
SQL Server Enum Implementation: A Single-Row View Strategy for Avoiding Magic Values
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Enum Implementation: A...
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT I
In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:
UserID UserPermissions 15 23 37What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount from dbo.UserPermission where UserID = 3;See possible answers