The Selfish Case for Learning AI
Steve has a good reason to spend time working with and learning about AI technology.
2025-10-31
149 reads
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Lessons from the Postmark-MCP Backdoor
The Koi Security team recently uncovered the first known, malicious MCP server in the wild: a package called postmark-mcp, downloaded over 1,500 times per week, that silently BCCs every outgoing email to an attacker-controlled domain. So, what happened? High-level, a lot: The attacker cloned the legitimate Postmark MCP repository, made one small but nefarious change […]
2025-10-04
227 reads
Natural Language Query for SQL Server
Data is usually the most important asset in organizations, but only SQL developers can frequently access that data. Technical teams often write queries for non-technical users. This restricts agility, slows decision-making, and creates a bottleneck in data accessibility. One possible remedy is natural language processing (NLP), which enables users to ask questions in simple English and receive answers without knowing any code. Still, the majority of NLP-to-SQL solutions are cloud-based, which raises issues with cost and privacy.
2025-10-03
2025-09-29
229 reads
Building AI Governance and Policies- First Steps
AI has moved from experimental to operational in record time for many organizations. In industries like fintech, healthcare, and retail where sensitive PII (personally identifiable information) and relational databases are the backbone of daily operations, this innovation speed to adopt AI brings enormous opportunity, but also significant risks
2025-09-27
110 reads
Getting More Time from AI
Today Steve wonders what you might do with extra time if the AI can give it to you.
2025-09-24
99 reads
AI Steals Joy
Are the AI tools developers use making them enjoy their jobs more or less? Steve has a few thoughts.
2025-09-15
1,162 reads
2025-09-06
149 reads
Using Ollama on Windows 11 as an Alternative to Public LLMs
In my ongoing war against shadow AI, I’ve been testing out alternatives that most everyone can use, no matter what your technical expertise. Although somewhat limited depending on your resources available, (laptop CPU/GPU, memory, etc.) If you want to try the newest open models without sending your prompts to the cloud, or you just want […]
2025-08-16
841 reads
Everyone Wants a Piece of the AI Pie
Swiping through LinkedIn feels like watching a campsite suddenly flooded with s’mores. Every other ad, i.e. post, promises the next miracle AI service, platform, or “AI-powered” widget. It’s a frenzy that says: “If buzzwords paid the bills, we’d all be billionaires already.” I can’t fault the reasoning, there’s a lot of buzz out there telling […]
2025-08-09
116 reads
Blogs
Keeping Redshift System Table History Past 7 Days with S3 Tables
Redshift keeps its SYS_* monitoring views for seven days in cluster, which is fine...
Updating the Data API Builder
By Steve Jones
I was updating my session for the Data API Builder (DAB) recently, mostly to...
T-SQL Tuesday #202 Invitation: That One SQL Server Outage You’ll Never Forget
I am excited to host T-SQL Tuesday for the first time. I want to...
Forums
Practical Ways to Approach SQL Server Problems and Case Studies
Working with SQL Server can involve more than just writing queries. Understanding database design,...
Measuring Productivity
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Measuring Productivity
Importing Excel files into SQL Server using DuckDB and Python
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Importing Excel files into SQL...
Question of the Day
Tracking All the Queries
I have 3 instances of a brand new long running query that are executing on a SQL Server 2025 instance. Query store is enabled. One of the queries is killed by the administrator, one is cancelled by the user. The other runs to completion. How many rows are in Query Store for this query?
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