Microsoft Build announcements
Once again there were a number of Microsoft Build announcements related to data and AI, and some were very impressive. Below are my favorites. Everything announced at Build can...
2025-05-22
25 reads
James Serra's Blog
Deciphering Data Architectures: When to Use a Warehouse, Fabric, Lakehouse, or Mesh
As discussed in my blog and book “Deciphering Data Architectures: Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh” (Amazon), organizations are often challenged with...
2025-05-28 (first published: 2025-05-06)
678 reads
Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference
A ton of new features for Microsoft Fabric were announced at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference recently. Here are all the new features that I found most interesting, with some...
2025-04-23 (first published: 2025-04-09)
351 reads
Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric
In today’s data-driven world, organizations need the ability to analyze and act on data as it flows in real time. Microsoft Fabric provides a powerful ecosystem for real-time intelligence,...
2025-03-24 (first published: 2025-03-12)
7,347 reads
Azure SQL offerings
There are three Azure SQL products with so many different deployment options, service tiers, and compute tiers that it can get quite confusing when choosing the right option for...
2025-03-03 (first published: 2025-02-18)
1,196 reads
Cool AI sites
As I researched and wrote my OpenAI and LLMs blogs (see Introduction to OpenAI and LLMs, Introduction to OpenAI and LLMs – Part 2 and Introduction to OpenAI and...
2025-02-07 (first published: 2025-01-29)
672 reads
Introduction to OpenAI and LLMs – Part 3
My previous blog posts on this topic were Introduction to OpenAI and LLMs, the “what” part (what is OpenAI and LLM), and the “how” part Introduction to OpenAI and LLMs –...
2025-01-09
27 reads
Ways to land data into Fabric OneLake
Microsoft Fabric is rapidly gaining popularity as a unified data platform, leveraging OneLake as its central data storage hub for all Fabric-integrated products. A variety of tools and methods...
2024-12-18 (first published: 2024-12-12)
606 reads
Microsoft Ignite Announcements Nov 2024
Announced at Microsoft Ignite last week were some new product features related to the data platform and AI. Check out the Major announcements and Book of News. Below are...
2024-12-06 (first published: 2024-11-26)
334 reads
Benefits of Migrating from Azure Synapse Analytics to Microsoft Fabric
Many customers ask me about the advantages of moving from Azure Synapse Analytics to Microsoft Fabric. Here’s a breakdown of the standout features that make Fabric an appealing choice:...
2024-11-25 (first published: 2024-11-06)
315 reads
Blogs
Learning from Mistakes: T-SQL Tuesday #194
By Steve Jones
We’re a week late, once again my fault. I was still coming out of...
Stupid Things I Did With AI: ASCII Art
By Steve Jones
I ran across this article recently (https://www.gatesnotes.com/meet-bill/source-code/reader/microsoft-original-source-code) and it has a great opening piece...
Simple Talks Podcasting in 2026
By Steve Jones
I’m in the UK today, having arrived this morning in London. Hopefully, by this...
Forums
Learning From Breakage
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Learning From Breakage
Python in Action to Auto-Generate an Optimized PostgreSQL Index Strategy
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Python in Action to Auto-Generate...
Adding and Dropping Columns I
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Adding and Dropping Columns I
Question of the Day
Adding and Dropping Columns I
I have this table in my SQL Server 2022 database:
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CityList] ( [CityNameID] [int] NOT NULL IDENTITY(1, 1), [CityName] [varchar] (30) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GOI decide to add two new columns for the StateProvince and Country. What code should I use? See possible answers