As with others, I've had to deal with death in the family recently. Some other family members are dealing with cancer (a few friends too). Happily none of us has recently been a disaster zone, but that's happened too. So yeah, big, nasty scary stuff happens in life. However, for most of us, most of […]
2025-07-19
16 reads
I was just reading about how the Philippines are working to update their databases in support of faster and better responses in the case of an emergency. While I do volunteer for some of the local emergency services, I'm right at the bottom of the heap as just a radio operator. I don't have any […]
2025-07-18
51 reads
I hop in the Jeep the other day and turn on my ham radio. Have I mentioned I'm a licensed amateur radio operator? Yeah, yeah, I know. I won't shut up about it. Ha! My call sign is KC1KCE. I haven't been on HF in a while, but I'm regularly on the air locally here […]
2025-07-16
68 reads
One of my favorite things about going to in-person events is just the time when we're sitting around chatting, out in the hallway, over at the vendor booths, maybe in the speaker room. Any of them. Inevitably, you start to get what I would call "sea stories" (Navy & Coasties, "war stories" for the pickles, […]
2025-07-14
119 reads
Working across Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, I've learned that the real challenge isn’t just knowing each platform, but understanding the subtle differences in terminology, syntax, and mindset, and staying open to learning on the fly every time I jump in. The “Sacred Six” are rules that I’ve learned to live by and accept. […]
2025-07-12
63 reads
If you’ve ever had to format dates and times in SQL, you’ve probably come across one of the most jarring realities of working across platforms: every major RDBMS does it differently and sometimes confusingly. What’s a TO_CHAR() in Oracle becomes FORMAT() or CONVERT() in SQL Server, and its sort of the same in PostgreSQL… but […]
2025-07-11
117 reads
There’s a moment I experience all too often in tech meetings, presentations, or vendor demos where someone starts talking, and instead of clarity, I get hit with a tidal wave of jargon: “synergizing AI-driven orchestration pipelines for real-time actionable insights using cloud-native microservices and agentic AI to serve as a digital twin.” And somewhere in […]
2025-07-09
76 reads
Sometimes, while working on something as foundational as SQL Server Central, (which is a temporary responsibility for Grant, John and I while Steve is on sabbatical) I catch myself falling into an old, familiar loop double-checking my choices, second-guessing even the most minor decisions, as is the norm for anyone who’s a database administrator (or […]
2025-07-08
134 reads
In the US, this is the Independence Day weekend. I had a few spare vacation days, so I tacked one on, making this a four day weekend. My plans are simple. Prep for my family coming over on the 5th for a celebration of the 4th (Ha!). Work on my query tuning book (gotta make […]
2025-07-05
61 reads
Hello, Grant again as Steve is on sabbatical. My evenings and weekends are currently being used to update my SQL Server query performance book for 2025. I really enjoy it because writing the book forces me to structure my learning on SQL Server 2025, not just hit it in some slipshod manner. Plus, I've got […]
2025-07-04
70 reads
By Daniel Janik
The circle cylinder of life Maybe you’ve noticed all the twenty somethings tight rolling...
By Chris Yates
In today’s data-driven economy, organizations are no longer asking if they should invest in...
By Rohit Garg
PostgreSQL, often referred to as Postgres, is a powerful, open-source object-relational database system that...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How a Legacy Logic Choked...
Good Morning All, We are facing replication latency issue. I checked for blocking, long...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Life's Little Frustrations
I have this table in SQL Server 2022:
CREATE TABLE CustomerLarge (CustomerID INT NOT NULL IDENTITY(1, 1) CONSTRAINT CustomerLargePK PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED , CustomerName VARCHAR(20) , CustomerContactFirstName VARCHAR(40) , CustomerContactLastName VARCHAR(40) , Address VARCHAR(20) , Address2 VARCHAR(20) , City VARCHAR(20) , CountryCode CHAR(3) , Postal VARCHAR(20) ) GOIf I check the columns_updated() function return in a trigger, what is the data returned? See possible answers