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
244 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)
234 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
129 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)
185 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)
450 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
175 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
81 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
48 reads
Prime Day Recommendations
It’s Prime Day. A few of my recommendations, since I want to do some shopping myself (yes, these are commissioned referrals). These are things I’ve ordered and used this...
2026-06-24 (first published: 2026-06-23)
66 reads
Fabric for Operational Reporting & SQL Endpoint Trap
With Fabric Mirroring, Microsoft is promoting a nice and appealing story for operational reporting build entirely in Fabric where you can have almost live data in reports. The pitch...
2026-07-08 (first published: 2026-06-23)
334 reads
Blogs
Using AI to Build Semantic Models, Ontologies, and Fabric Data Agents
By James Serra
(This is the third post in a three-part series on how AI is changing...
SSMS Is Getting Smarter—and This Isn’t Just About Writing SQL
Continuing with my takeaways from SQLCon and FabCon Europe in Barcelona, let’s talk about...
Yippee-Kai-Yay 2027 Summit in Denver
By Steve Jones
Next year the PASS Data Community Summit is in DENVER! and London, but Denver...
Forums
Pay for Performance
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Pay for Performance, which is...
Life hack that has worked well for me
I wrote about this several years ago but will contribute again a life hack...
Trying to make this faster using not exists
Hi I have this query that is slow during the 'not in' part of...
Question of the Day
Switching Schemas I
I run this query:
SELECT s.name AS schemaname , o.name AS objectname FROM sys.objects o INNER JOIN sys.schemas s ON s.schema_id = o.schema_id WHERE o.name = 'Beer'I get one row back for an object named dbo.beer. There is an ETL schema and both of these are nonpartitioned tables. I run this code:
ALTER TABLE dbo.beer switch TO etl.beerWhat happens? See possible answers