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...

SQL Server Problems You Can Reproduce, Measure and Fix: A Free Demo Library

I built a free library of runnable SQL Server demos. Each reproduces a real production problem on purpose, measures the fixes, and checks its own predictions on SQL Server...

Experimenting with CHOOSE: #SQLNewBlogger

I was looking over the CHOOSE() function while editing an article at SQL Server Central. I realized there isn’t a documentation note on how many parameters can be included....

Fighting Procrastination?

Here is another short video (~ 15 minutes). This is by the author of The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg. In this video, he delves into why we procrastinate...

A Fun Prize at the PASS Data Community Summit

I had a briefing for the 2026 PASS Data Community Summit, which is just a couple of weeks away. Amongst a bunch of admin type stuff, there was a...