dataMinds Saturday 2026 – Slides
At Saturday the 21st of February I’m presenting an introduction to dimensional modelling at dataMinds Saturday. It’s a topic close to my heart, and I’ve always wanted to present...
2026-02-20
17 reads
Blog Posts
The Book of Redgate: SQL Server Central
It was neat to stumble on this in the book, a piece by me, just a few years after Redgate acquired SQL Server Central. I’ll let the words speak...
2026-02-20 (first published: 2026-02-13)
289 reads
tSQLt Test Adapter for Visual Studio 2022+
I have had a number of requests for me to update the tSqlt Test Adapter over the years so it would work with more recent versions of Visual Studio....
2026-02-20 (first published: 2025-12-30)
257 reads
Claude AI Convinced Me Not to Build an iPad App
I coach volleyball and I do a lot of stat stuff on paper. I decided recently to see if I could find a way to more easily automate things....
2026-02-18 (first published: 2026-02-09)
498 reads
SQL Server Upgrades: In-Place or New Server?
This isn’t a religious debate. I have a client right now debating how to handle SQL Server upgrades across all of their dev and test environments. And it’s...
2026-02-18 (first published: 2025-12-31)
413 reads
Claude Code Helps Analyze Test Data Manager Log Files
I had a customer ask about analyzing their Test Data Manager (TDM) usage to determine how many people were protecting data in dev databases and how often. TDM creates...
2026-02-16 (first published: 2026-02-04)
246 reads
PowerPoint to HTML with Claude AI
I had an idea for an animated view of a sales tool, and started to build this in PowerPoint. I decided to switch to Claude and ended up with...
2026-02-13 (first published: 2026-02-03)
366 reads
Making Sense of Microsoft’s AI Strategy: Work IQ, Fabric IQ, Foundry IQ
A few weeks ago, I found myself staring at a slide full of new Microsoft AI names and thinking… wait a second. Work IQ. Fabric IQ. Foundry IQ. Agent...
2026-02-12
18 reads
Fix Slow, Bloated MSDB: Purge Old History And Add Missing Indexes
Fix Slow, Bloated MSDB: Purge Old History And Add Missing Indexes
After tempdb, msdb is often the most abused system database, growing unchecked until it tanks...
2026-02-11 (first published: 2026-01-30)
456 reads
SQL Server 2025 CU1 Fixes the Docker Desktop AVX Issue on macOS
Microsoft fixed the AVX instruction issue in SQL Server 2025 CU1. The container now runs successfully on Docker Desktop for macOS without needing OrbStack.
2026-02-11 (first published: 2026-02-02)
99 reads
Blogs
The First Steps: Understanding the Basics of FinOps
By HeyMo0sh
As a DevOps professional, I’ve seen firsthand how cloud costs can quickly spiral out...
Monday Monitor Tips: AI Query Analysis
By Steve Jones
AI is everywhere. It’s in the news, it’s being added to every product, management...
AI: Blog a Day – Day 8: RAG – Retrieval Augmented Generation
By Vinay Thakur
RAG — Retrieval Augmented Generation. we have covered so far — embeddings, vectors, vector...
Forums
would it be so terrible to install ssms on a few user desktops?
Hi, ssms is free here. I can think of other reasons to do this...
I'm thinking about submitting some articles
I've written some documentation on using different Markdown types of files on GitHub. It's...
Not Just an Upgrade
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Not Just an Upgrade
Question of the Day
Restoring On Top I
I am doing development work on a database and want to keep a backup so I can reset my database. I make some changes and want to restore over top of my changes. When I run this code, what happens?
USE Master BACKUP DATABASE DNRTest TO DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' GO USE DNRTest GO CREATE TABLE MyTest(myid INT) GO USE master RESTORE DATABASE DNRTest FROM DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' WITH REPLACESee possible answers