Crash-Consistent MongoDB Snapshot and Restore with Everpure Fusion

I’ve been working on a project that combines two things I spend a lot of time with: MongoDB sharded clusters and Everpure FlashArrays. The goal is a production-grade backup...

Microsoft Purview data governance best practices

Microsoft Purview can be the best data governance tool in the world, but it will still be useless if people do not know it exists, do not trust the...

AI and Data Engineering on the Edge: The Good, the Bad, and the Overhyped

Running AI and data pipelines on the edge instead of the cloud has gone from a niche embedded concern to a default option on a lot of architecture diagrams....

Databases and AI Agents

As part of my wider work exploring Claude Code and AI-assisted database engineering, I have been looking at how AI can support SQL Server operations. A failed job, missed...

PowerShell Strikes Back: Return of the Loop

Welcome back to PowerShell Strikes Back. We’re three weeks in, and the training is paying off. In Week 1, we learned that quotes are not interchangeable. In Week 2,...

UNION vs UNIONALL: #SQLNewBlogger

While writing another post I realized my UNION query didn’t work as one might initiall expect, so I decided a short post was worth writing. This is based on...

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...

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...

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...