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...

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...

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...

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...

What’s New at AWS re:Invent 2025 – Day 1 Highlights

Day 1 is an absolute thrill at re:Invent! I normally dedicate this dynamic day to connect with new faces, explore the bustling expo hall, engage with customers and service...

Performance tuning KubeVirt for SQL Server

Following on from my last post about Getting Started With KubeVirt & SQL Server, in this post I want to see if I can improve the performance from the...

Dry-run xp_delete_file Before Actually Deleting Files?

Dry-run xp_delete_file Before Actually Deleting Files?

xp_delete_file doesn’t really have a built-in dry-run option to preview which files it would remove. But there’s a simple workaround,...

Microsoft Ignite Announcements Nov 2025

Announced at Microsoft Ignite two weeks ago were many new product features related to the data platform. Check out the Major announcements and Book of News. I went through the many announcements and picked...

Chatting with Power BI: Who Benefits from This Conversation?

"Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.Dave: What’s the problem?HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as...

Data Viz in Fabric Notebooks

Lots of people have created Power BI reports, using interactive data visualizations to explore and communicate data. When Power BI was first created, it was used in situations that...