Don’t Fight with AI

I was recently trying to handle a simple task with a few AI tools to see how well things worked. I realized that AI isn’t great for everything and...

Narrow Task Decomposition in AI Pipeline Agents

A nightly load into sales_fact fails. Ask an orchestrating agent to break down the diagnosis and it will usually stop at the first two subtasks that come to mind:...

Car Update: August 2026

It’s been some time since I provided a car update, so I decided to showcase a few things I’ve learned about my cars since the last one. In this...

Microsoft Fabric OneLake Shortcuts: When to Use Them and When Not To

An architecture scenario Imagine separate Sales, Finance, Shared Data, and Executive Analytics workspaces. Sales owns sales transactions, Finance owns budgets, and Shared Data owns common tables such as Customer,...

SQL Server Security Hardening Guide Using the DoD STIG Checklist

Security on your SQL Server is important. That doesn’t need any explaining. But where do you start when evaluating the security of your SQL Server? If you are like...

EightKB 2026: Registration is Open!

It’s that time of year again! EightKB is back on August 20th at 13:00 UTC, and registration is open right now. It’s completely free. No catch, just a full...

TRY_PARSE Limitations: #SQLNewBlogger

I got a notification from a question I’d posted at SQL Server Central: Getting the Average. A user had posted their repro didn’t work, with no real comment. As...

SQL Server sa Account Security: Rename, Disable & Best Practices

SQL Server sa Account Security: Rename, Disable & Best Practices

In the Windows administration world, it's pretty much a standard practice to rename the local administrator...

Stanford Emerging Technology Review 2026 Report is out

Artificial Intelligence and quantum computing are two areas of emerging technology that receive most of the tech news. However, the Stanford Emerging Technology Review tries to include any relevant...

How I Troubleshoot a Slow SQL Server Live

No two SQL Server environments are alike. A fix that resolves a performance issue in one environment may not work in another because every SQL Server instance has different...