A New Word: the Kinder Surprise

the kinder surprise – . the point in your early adolescence when you realize that your parents are muddling through their lives the same as you; that many respectable...

Crash-Consistent Snapshot Cloning - Hyper-V Edition

If you’ve been following my T-SQL Snapshot Backup series, most of what I’ve covered requires SQL Server to participate in the snapshot: the write IO freeze, the metadata backup,...

Using T-SQL Snapshot Backup - Hyper-V Edition

If you’ve been following my T-SQL Snapshot Backup series, you’ve seen this technique work on bare-metal and standard VM deployments where database files live on volumes directly presented to...

The secret APEX performance hack

Here’s a little secret APEX performance hack if you are running on the Autonomous database. As background, I’m running an Autonomous database with six CPUs and a terabyte of...

VPN + SQL Server Connections: Why Long-Working Setups Suddenly Fail with Msg 10054 and “Connection Broken”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been contacted by multiple customers experiencing the same frustrating issue. Applications and SSMS sessions that had been rock-solid for years suddenly started throwing...

Future IT Roles – Agentic Architect and AI Boom!!

These days everything is changing to AI World, IT roles are getting changed and it is going towards AI ways, everyone in IT should be aware of AI –...

Free Webinar about Columnstore Indexes

I’m doing a small series on indexing basics for SQL Server, and on May 14th I’ll be presenting the third part which is about columnstore indexes. You can watch...

PlanTrace: Stop Reading Redshift EXPLAIN Plans. Start Seeing Them

PlanTrace: Stop Reading Redshift EXPLAIN Plans. Start Seeing Them

Introducing PlanTrace — a free, browser-based tool that turns raw execution plans into interactive graphs and actionable tuning insights.

plantrace.studyyourdata.com

PlanTrace...

A Cloud Dependency Failure from Amazon

I went to sleep while reading a Kindle book on my phone. I know because my hand dropped and the phone knocked me in the forehead. I set it...

Deploying AI in logistics (the unfiltered version)

A conversation with Jan Laš, CIO at HOPI, about what deploying a data agent looks like from the client’s side; the users who drifted away, the security work nobody...