SQL Undercover TV – Instant File Initialisation

Adrian has a look at the performance benefits of instant file initialisation Below is Ade’s auto growth script…

Starting and Stopping SQL Server with PowerShell

Have you ever had this issue? You are trying to explore new features of SQL Server or you want to install the latest version for some testing, but SQL...

T-SQL Tuesday 123: Life Hacks to make your day easier

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Jess Pomfret. Jess’s theme is ‘Life Hacks to make your day easier’. She talks of some things we do to make life...

Ethics in Modern Data presentation at SQLSaturday Austin BI Edition 2020

Excited to launch another new presentation, the first co-presented with my wife, on Ethics in Modern Data. We'll explore the ethical considerations around historical bias, ethics in analysis and...

Asciidoc Distributed Docs as Code

TEST The Problem

I want to keep my code and my documentation in the same place.
I want to separate the presentation layer from my documentation content.
I want to be flexible...

Azure Databricks Performance Notes

(2020-Feb-04) I didn't name this blog post as "Performance Tips" since I'm just creating the list of helpful notes for myself for tuning the performance of my workload with delta...

Extended Events: Histogram Output

The single most important thing to remember about Extended Events is that this functionality is not simply a replacement for Profiler/Trace, but a whole new tool with new functionality....

Azure Data Studio extension – help wanted

I’ve created a sample ads extension that checks TSQL syntax in real-time for potential bad practice. Right now the extension is using regex, which isn’t the best for parsing...

I can do better; we can do better; let’s do better

In the past week or so, the Microsoft Data Platform community has begun having a discussion about inclusivity, both on Twitter and across community blog posts. This conversation began...

I Presented with Live Captioning and Sign Language Interpreters

I had the pleasure of presenting a full-day pre-conference session on the Friday before SQLSaturday Austin-BI last weekend. I could spend paragraphs telling you how enjoyable and friendly and...