Gatekeeping and why language matters

This is the second in a series of posts about gatekeeping in Information Technology and other fields. Negative terminology The language we use matters. In the first post I...

How I Continuously Learn About SQL Server

Watch this week’s episode on YouTube. In order to stay current in a technology you have to immerse yourself in community content. Documentation is good for knowing the specification...

Is it just me or does msdb feel a lot like a user database?

When you think of system databases, tables, etc there are a number of things you might think of. Necessary to ... Continue reading

Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud

Microsoft and Oracle recently announced a joint cloud partnership (I have seen the word multi/cross-cloud to explain this) which I found very fascinating to read. It is currently in...

5 Things You Need To Know When Reading SQL Server Execution Plans

Watch this week's video on YouTube

Part 1: Introduction to Execution Plans
Part 2: Overview of Statistics
Part 3: Reading an Execution Plan
Part 4: Commonly Troublesome Operators
Part 5: Troubleshooting Execution Plans

In the...

5 Things You Need To Know When Reading SQL Server Execution Plans

Watch this week's video on YouTube

Part 1: Introduction to Execution Plans
Part 2: Overview of Statistics
Part 3: Reading an Execution Plan
Part 4: Commonly Troublesome Operators
Part 5: Troubleshooting Execution Plans

In the...

A Day in the Life (4/?) - August 2, 2019

This is my fourth installment in a series responding to Steve Jones’s (blog | twitter) #SQLCareer challenge. I jotted down most of what I did through the day, filling...

Azure Service Logging in the Modern Data Warehouse

[read this post on Mr. Fox SQL blog] The “modern data platform” architecture is becoming more and more popular as organisations shift towards identifying, collecting and centralising their data...

Azure SQL Database Clustered Columnstore Index

You can read about columnstore indexes here (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/transforming-your-data-in-azure-sql-database-to-columnstore-format/). I won’t rehash the material but high level, these index types are optimized for analytical queries and high compression of data...

Short circuiting an AND

The other day I did a post on how an OR short circuts. It was a somewhat unusual type of ... Continue reading