Investing for AI
Steve looks to the future of Microsoft and AI after listening to a podcast with Satya Nadella
2025-12-10
80 reads
Editorials
Your Security Checkup
We often find security issues come from holes in the way we've set up systems. Steve asks if you perform security checkups on your systems.
2025-12-08
90 reads
How Important Are Real Time Decisions?
There has been a push to build real time analytics and decision support systems. Steve discusses whether this is a good idea for many organizations.
2025-12-05
104 reads
SQL Server Licensing is Simple
Over the years I've had no shortage of licensing questions for SQL Server. At times it's felt a little crazy. Look at the licensing guide. Choose EE or SE and the number of cores. Then check if you're using VMs. Oh, and consider the cloud, and which cloud you're running a workload on. It's simple […]
2025-12-03
180 reads
Don't Let Corner Cases Drive Your Design
When we design a database or system, we often do so with corner cases in mind. We don't have to do this.
2025-12-01
101 reads
FinOps - the new name for performance tuning
This year I have been speaking with an increasing number of people about FinOps and what it means. Fundamentally, it is all about getting a handle on the cost for our technology spend. When we step back and look at the bigger picture it also has ramifications on corporate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) programs […]
2025-11-29
120 reads
2025-11-28
54 reads
Done is Better than Good
Getting something done is important, but so is the quality level. Steve has a few thoughts today.
2025-11-26
88 reads
Growing Artificial Intelligence
This week Steve Jones discusses artificial intelligence and one of the building blocks that will be needed: data.
2025-11-25 (first published: 2016-07-04)
98 reads
The DBA's Twelve Days of Christmas
On the first day of Christmas my new DBA sent to me A table with a primary key On the second day of Christmas my new DBA sent to me Two Foreign Keys, and A table with a primary key On the third day of Christmas my new DBA sent to me Three stored procs […]
2025-11-25 (first published: 2019-12-24)
269 reads
Blogs
Why Optimize CPU for RDS SQL Server is a game changer
One feature that I have been waiting for years! The new announcement around optimize...
Performance tuning KubeVirt for SQL Server
Following on from my last post about Getting Started With KubeVirt & SQL Server,...
T-SQL Tuesday #193 – A Note to Your Past, and a Warning from Your Future
By DesertDBA
I haven’t posted in a while (well, not here at least since I’ve been...
Forums
Change Tracking – Troubleshooting
I have change tracking configured in several databases, in QA and production environments, and...
is there a no code way to limit an ssis extract from excel to the 1st 21 rows?
is there a no code way to limit an ssis extract from excel to...
Pivot but preserve all rows on Aggregate column
Hello Need help in pivoting this data set, the Pivot takes MIN/MAX on a...
Question of the Day
What is the PRODUCT
In SQL Server 2025, what does this return?
CREATE TABLE Numbers ( n INT) GO INSERT dbo.Numbers ( n ) VALUES (1), (2), (3) GO SELECT PRODUCT(n) FROM dbo.NumbersSee possible answers