Your Value from a Conference
Today Steve asks what value you get from attending conferences or other events.
2025-12-19
51 reads
Editorials
The Challenge of AI
Steve sees a lot of challenges ahead for AI, especially in the area of labor and employment.
2025-12-17
88 reads
Growing Artificial Intelligence
This week Steve Jones discusses artificial intelligence and one of the building blocks that will be needed: data.
2025-12-15 (first published: 2016-07-04)
198 reads
The AI Bubble and the Weak Foundation Beam
The problem that I continue to struggle with the AI Bubble is not innovation, but who has leverage. The AI industry has quietly constructed a capital stack with too many mutual dependencies and too few independent cash flows. When AI profitability hiccups, the financial impact does not land in one place. It cascades across the entire championship and everyone loses and not all players are equally positioned to survive it. This is the AI Bubble in a foundational nutshell.
2025-12-13
734 reads
Refactoring SQL Code
Refactoring code is a common task in many software development teams. Steve asks if this is something common for database developers as well.
2025-12-12
320 reads
Investing for AI
Steve looks to the future of Microsoft and AI after listening to a podcast with Satya Nadella
2025-12-10
127 reads
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
145 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
116 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
260 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
115 reads
Blogs
Prime Day Recommendations
By Steve Jones
It’s Prime Day. A few of my recommendations, since I want to do some...
Fabric for Operational Reporting & SQL Endpoint Trap
With Fabric Mirroring, Microsoft is promoting a nice and appealing story for operational reporting...
Crawl, Walk, Run with Agentic Development of Power BI Assets
If you’ve been watching AI roll through the data community and thinking, “this seems...
Forums
SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
Concurrency and Baseline Control: Level 5 of the Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Concurrency and Baseline Control: Level...
Spending Time in the Office
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Spending Time in the Office
Question of the Day
Multiple Values Inserted
I have this code on SQL Server 2022. What happens when it runs all at once?
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.Commission GO CREATE TABLE dbo.Commission (id INT NOT NULL IDENTITY(1,1) CONSTRAINT CommissionPK PRIMARY KEY , salesperson VARCHAR(20) , commission VARCHAR(20) ) GO INSERT dbo.Commission ( salesperson, commission) VALUES ( 'Brian', 12 ), ( 'Brian', 'None' ) GOSee possible answers