Asking for Help Isn’t a Weakness

During COVID, I attended training on software/enterprise architecture given by Mark Richards. One of the things he pointed out that differentiates an architect from a senior administrator/developer/engineer is that...

The Proof of the Backup Is in the Pudding

For me, the objective is straightforward: have a backup strategy that is reliable, understandable, maintainable, and, most importantly, restorable. A successful backup job is good news. A successful restore...

T-SQL Tuesday #204 – Are blogs still relevant?

Note: This post is the invitation for T-SQL Tuesday #204 on November 3rd, 2026. If you’d like to reply, your response should go live on November 10th, 2026. All...

A Front Door for the DBA Team – AgentDBA UI

AgentDBA began as a command line. That suits one DBA on one server, but it’s a poor way to give a team a read-only advisor. The obvious fix is...

Cleaning Up Azure MS Defender Billing

I have a few Azure subscriptions, which are fairly small and not used that often. Mainly I do some SQL Server or Azure SQL experimentation. Sometimes I might create...

Installing and Configuring containerd as a Kubernetes Container Runtime

This post shows you how to install containerd as the container runtime for Kubernetes and configure it to use the systemd cgroup driver. The commands below were tested on...

It’s 2026 and I’m retired, so lets get Visual Basic 6.0 to run on Windows 11

In 1999 I released my first commercial software product. ShutOff 2000 was a Windows application that could log off or shut down Windows in multiple ways. It was successful...

Car Update October 2026

This month I want to look at a few of the things I’ve seen posted about cars during the last month. These are a few headlines, as well as...

SQL Server 2016 Has Reached End of Support. Now What?

SQL Server 2016 Has Reached End of Support. Now What?

On July 14, 2026, SQL Server 2016 reached the end of extended support. That means regular...

The New Unified Copilot in Fabric and Project Osmos: From AI Assistance to Agentic Data Engineering

(This post starts a three-part series on how AI is changing the way we build solutions in Microsoft Fabric. First, we’ll explore how the new unified Copilot in Fabric...