Narrow Task Decomposition in AI Pipeline Agents

A nightly load into sales_fact fails. Ask an orchestrating agent to break down the diagnosis and it will usually stop at the first two subtasks that come to mind:...

Rambling about Data on Wheels – origins, branding, expansion

I have been asked many times about how the name “Data on Wheels” came to be. I decided that is a good topic to ramble about, so here goes....

EightKB 2026: Registration is Open!

It’s that time of year again! EightKB is back on August 20th at 13:00 UTC, and registration is open right now. It’s completely free. No catch, just a full...

Microsoft Fabric OneLake Shortcuts: When to Use Them and When Not To

An architecture scenario Imagine separate Sales, Finance, Shared Data, and Executive Analytics workspaces. Sales owns sales transactions, Finance owns budgets, and Shared Data owns common tables such as Customer,...

SQL Server Security Hardening Guide Using the DoD STIG Checklist

Security on your SQL Server is important. That doesn’t need any explaining. But where do you start when evaluating the security of your SQL Server? If you are like...

Getting the SQL Server MCP Server Running

If you’ve wanted a SQL Server MCP server for your databases, it’s available. The SQL MCP Server is a part of the Data API Builder (DAB). DAB is a...

Match the Model to the Task, Not the App: An Orchestrator-Worker Pattern in Python

Most apps that call an LLM send every request to the same model. That works until the bill arrives.

A classification job that returns one word costs...

SQL Server sa Account Security: Rename, Disable & Best Practices

SQL Server sa Account Security: Rename, Disable & Best Practices

In the Windows administration world, it's pretty much a standard practice to rename the local administrator...

TRY_PARSE Limitations: #SQLNewBlogger

I got a notification from a question I’d posted at SQL Server Central: Getting the Average. A user had posted their repro didn’t work, with no real comment. As...

How I Troubleshoot a Slow SQL Server Live

No two SQL Server environments are alike. A fix that resolves a performance issue in one environment may not work in another because every SQL Server instance has different...