AI Helps Me with My Sloppiness
I type fairly well. Well, I type fast, but I do wear out a backspace key relatively quickly on most keyboards. That and a space bar. AI helps me...
2026-07-01
34 reads
WITH clause gets a 26ai boost!
By way of background, a while back I did video called “My New Favourite Join” on the LATERAL clause. The reason I like it is that it lets you...
2026-07-13 (first published: 2026-07-01)
568 reads
Mystery Backups: Estimating Disk Space When All You Have Are .BAK Files
How Do You Determine How Much Disk Space You Need If You’re Handed 18 SQL Server Backups and No History? Happy last day of June, dear reader. Today’s post...
2026-06-30
4 reads
Automatic Index Compaction
Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend. Azure SQL’s new Automatic Index Compaction targets page density directly — so I tested it.
2026-07-10 (first published: 2026-06-30)
272 reads
The Goldilocks problem – Materialized Views
I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but I’d like to apply the Goldilocks principle to a database object-namely, a materialized view. You...
2026-06-30
27 reads
Monday Monitor Tips: Virtual Machine Usage and Cost
One of the things I’ve been requesting for a number of years is cost information. I could see this coming in 2015 with the move to the cloud and...
2026-07-13 (first published: 2026-06-29)
202 reads
Advice I Like: Respect
“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.” – from Excellent Advice for Living This is an interesting piece of advice. It’s easy to...
2026-06-26
93 reads
Blue Sky Programming – The Optimism Trap
Many years ago, before I joined Oracle, I was working on a major modernisation project. We were replacing an existing non-Oracle system with an entirely new Oracle database application...
2026-06-27 (first published: 2026-06-26)
41 reads
Setting Up a Mac for Data Engineering and AI Work
If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac with Apple Silicon is genuinely one of the best machines you can have as a...
2026-07-10 (first published: 2026-06-25)
325 reads
Want to look at cloud reporting but not sure what the costs will be?
Have you been thinking about migrating your reporting to Microsoft Fabric or Snowflake but you have no idea what it would actually cost? ?? That’s the scariest thing, and...
2026-06-25
143 reads
Blogs
Methodology for dealing with bad data in production
By Brian Kelley
Pinal Dave wrote up his methodology for what to do when you discover bad...
How to Provision an Azure SQL Database
Aside from spinning up a SQL Server instance container, the free Azure SQL Database...
Claude finds two cryptographic weaknesses (but the sky isn’t falling)
By Brian Kelley
If you haven't seen the announcement, Anthropic was able to utilize Claude (Mythos Preview)...
Forums
Why SQL Server Database Attach fails and how to repair it
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Why SQL Server Database Attach...
Fixing P1 Queries
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Fixing P1 Queries
BIT_COUNT() IV
Comments posted to this topic are about the item BIT_COUNT() IV
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT() IV
In SQL Server 2025, I run this code:
select bit_count('A')
What is returned? See possible answers