Data Skew in Data Engineering: What It Is and How to Fix It

You kick off a distributed job expecting it to finish in minutes — but one task keeps running while all others have long since completed. The culprit is almost...

Deciphering Data Architectures Is Now Available in Multiple Languages

Since the release of my book Deciphering Data Architectures: Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh, I’ve been fortunate to hear from readers...

Distance Metrics for Semantic Similarity Searches in SQL Server 2025

Next up in my series talking about The Burrito Bot is diving into the different distance metrics used to calculate how a vector generated from a query compares to...

Error Deploying GraphQL in Fabric: dm_exec_describe_first_result_set

A while ago we suddenly had an error while trying to deploy one Fabric workspace to another using fabric-cicd. The issue was with a GraphQL object and the following...

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...

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...

SQL Server instance metadata inventory with PowerShell and SMO

SQL Server instance metadata inventory with PowerShell and SMO

The purpose of this article is to introduce a PowerShell script that I wrote and published on...

T-SQL Tuesday #199 Invitation: Back to on-prem?

It’s time for T-SQL Tuesday again! And we’re almost to number 200! T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly community blogging event started by Adam Machanic in 2009. Each month a...

A Fabric solution can be very cost effective

Are you currently using Microsoft Fabric or considering migrating to it? If so, there are a couple of options to significantly reduce your monthly running costs. Firstly, there’s the...

Using T-SQL Snapshot Backup - Hyper-V Edition

If you’ve been following my T-SQL Snapshot Backup series, you’ve seen this technique work on bare-metal and standard VM deployments where database files live on volumes directly presented to...