Take A Vote and Accept Your Loss
Learning to make decisions and then get work done is important to Steve. Read his thoughts today on many of the decisions software teams need to make.
2024-01-24
175 reads
software development
Fixing Poor Programming Practices
Today Steve has a few stories of how he's fixed poor programming practices and asks you to share your own.
2024-01-03
344 reads
Five database DevOps practices for boosting team productivity
Speed of delivery and protecting data can often feel incompatible, but there are industry-proven database DevOps practices that bring them together in harmony.
Across each of these five key practices, there’s a theme of removing barriers and cognitive load for teams; but crucially, they are also putting safeguards in place to reduce the risks to production environments.
2023-11-06
When Work Isn't Done
Today Steve looks at the case when one software developer finishes their work, but another doesn't. The challenge of reordering work is something that happens more and more as teams struggle to coordinate their efforts.
2023-11-03
122 reads
The Code Review Checklist
Code reviews are a part of many software development processes, but not used that often with database work. Today Steve has a few thoughts and asks if you have any formal code review process.
2023-10-16
473 reads
You Always Have a Software Pipeline
If you build software for customers, you have a pipeline. It might not be good, but you have one. Steve recommends you work to make sure this is a repeatable, reliable pipeline.
2023-10-13
95 reads
Modern Development
In some ways, development tasks haven't changed much in decades, but in others the way we build software has changed a lot, especially with regards to data.
2023-10-11
175 reads
2023-09-18
276 reads
Working around schema drift in SQL Server
At Stack Overflow, our environment has multiple implementations of a largely – but not 100% – identical schema. (By “schema,” I mostly mean the set of tables within a database.) I sometimes need to retrieve or update data across a large number of sites. Let’s say, pulling or removing information from the Users table, and related tables, across all of our databases.
2023-09-01
Using Clear Language to Avoid Confusion
Communication can be challenging when we don't work closely with others. Steve draws a comparison with a popular children's show in the US.
2023-08-14
133 reads
Blogs
AI: Blog a Day – Day 4: Transformers – Encoder, Decoder, and Attention
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 3 where we covered LLM models open/closed and their parameters, Today...
Flyway Tips: Multiple Projects
By Steve Jones
One of the nice things about Flyway Desktop is that it helps you manage...
What DevOps Look Like in Microsoft Fabric
By HeyMo0sh
Microsoft Fabric (not to be confused with the more general term “fabric” in DevOps)...
Forums
Can an Azure App Service Managed Identity be used for SQL Login?
I'm fairly certain I know the answer to this from digging into it yesterday,...
Azure Synapse database refresh
Hi Team, I am trying to refresh the Azure Synapse Dedicated pool from production...
how to write this query?
hi everyone I am not sure how to write the query that will produce...
Question of the Day
Fun with JSON I
I have some data in a table:
CREATE TABLE #test_data
(
id INT PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(100),
birth_date DATE
);
-- Step 2: Insert rows
INSERT INTO #test_data
VALUES
(1, 'Olivia', '2025-01-05'),
(2, 'Emma', '2025-03-02'),
(3, 'Liam', '2025-11-15'),
(4, 'Noah', '2025-12-22');
If I run this query, how many rows are returned?
SELECT *
FROM OPENJSON(
(
SELECT t.* FROM #test_data AS t FOR JSON PATH
)
) t; See possible answers