Speaking at dataMinds Connect 2024

I’m very excited to announce I’ve been selected as a speaker for dataMinds Connect 2024, Belgium’s (and maybe/probably/most likely mainland Europe’s) best and greatest Microsoft data platform conference. My...

Async stats update causing blocking

I recently encountered an issue where an index rebuild set to wait_at_low_priority ended up blocking an asynchronous statistics update.
This interaction led to a large blocking chain where queries were...

Level Up Your SQL Skills: The Best Intermediate to Advanced Courses

In the data-driven landscape of 2024, advanced SQL isn't just a nice-to-have, it's a career game-changer. Companies crave professionals who can wrangle data, uncover insights, and drive decision-making. If...

Query deadlock info in Azure SQL DB

A couple of weeks ago, a developer came to me and wanted to know how to figure out what was causing a deadlock. I honestly didn’t know where to...

MSSQL Database Property LastGoodCheckDbTime to Get the Last Successful DBCC CHECKDB on a Database

Database Property LastGoodCheckDbTime to Get the Last Successful DBCC CHECKDB on a Database

As one of the preventive database maintenance tasks, performing database integrity checks on almost every database you...

Dynamic Warehouse & Lakehouse Connections in Microsoft Fabric Data Pipelines

When you develop data pipelines in Microsoft Fabric (the Azure Data Factory equivalent in Fabric, not to be confused with deployment pipelines), you will most likely have some activities...

Using the Pure Storage PowerShellSDK2 - Part 5 - Checking Replication Status

Introduction Welcome back to the fifth installment of our blog series on using the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK2. In this post, we’re diving into a hands-on demonstration of using...

New Pluralsight Course - Certified Kubernetes Administrator - Performing Cluster Version Upgrades

We’re working through the major refresh of my Certified Kubernetes Administrator series at Pluralsight!
The next course “Certified Kubernetes Administrator: Performing Cluster Version Upgrades” in the updated series is now...

What I actually do at Microsoft

I started working at Microsoft in January 2022. I enjoy it. I even wrote a stream-of-consciousness post about it last year. A significant part of our job in the...

Talkie - a simple, private, responsive interface for LLMs

Watch this video on YouTube
I like using ChatGPT. But I don't like the $20/month price tag for using OpenAI's app, especially given the API costs fractions of a cent.
So...