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
15 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)
309 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
99 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)
218 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
101 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)
101 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)
398 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
151 reads
The Joyful Craftsmen and the Revolt BI join forces
The Joyful Craftsmen has become the new owner of Revolt BI. The merger creates one of the most significant independent groups in the field of data analytics, business intelligence...
2026-06-25
55 reads
KDA: Echoes of Deception - Case 5
A deleted podcast episode, 17 million archive log entries, and KQL's time series analysis to find the backup that was never supposed to survive.
2026-06-25
23 reads
Blogs
T-SQL Snapshot Backups on Availability Group Secondary Replicas
One of my favourite features of SQL Server 2022 was the T-SQL Snapshot Backups....
The Book of Redgate: Hours
By Steve Jones
I have said and written this many times: Redgate Software is the type of...
How to Check TDE Progress and Elapsed Time in SQL Server
By SQLPals
How to Check TDE Progress and Elapsed Time in SQL Server ...
Forums
Squared Values
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Managing Feature Flags with GET_BIT() and SET_BIT() in SQL Server
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Question of the Day
Squared Values
What happens when I run this code in SQL Server 2022?
SELECT SQUARE('12') See possible answers