Your Value from a Conference
Today Steve asks what value you get from attending conferences or other events.
2025-12-19
64 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
92 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)
202 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
746 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
372 reads
Investing for AI
Steve looks to the future of Microsoft and AI after listening to a podcast with Satya Nadella
2025-12-10
131 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
155 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
122 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
264 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
125 reads
Blogs
Accessing the Data API Builder MCP Server from VS Code
By Steve Jones
I recently started playing with the MCP Server for SQL Server, which is a...
From DBA or Data Engineer to AI Engineer: A Realistic Path
If you spend your days tuning queries, managing pipelines, or keeping a production database...
Asynchronous Replication of Snapshots from an ActiveCluster Pod to a Third Array
I’ve been rebuilding my three-site SQL Server demo lab, and I ran into something...
Forums
STRING_AGG DISTINCT
Has anyone written a wrapper function (or similar) around STRING_AGG() to allow the retrieval...
In-place OS upgrade or migration to new OS?
Putting this here as we're currently on SQL Server 2019 installed on Windows Server...
Never is Not the Policy
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Never is Not the Policy
Question of the Day
Rebuilding All Indexes
I have added a few indexes to one of my tables in SQL Server 2025:
ALTER TABLE dbo.CustomerContact
ADD CONSTRAINT PK_CustomerContact
PRIMARY KEY (CustomerID);
-- Create index on CustomerEmail
CREATE INDEX IX_CustomerContact_CustomerEmail
ON dbo.CustomerContact (CustomerEmail);
CREATE INDEX IX_CustomerContact_CustomerPhone
ON dbo.CustomerContact (phone);
I then do this to disable one index:
alter index IX_CustomerContact_CustomerPhone on dbo.CustomerContact disableI see this when I check the index status:
I decide to rebuild all indexes with this command:
ALTER INDEX ALL ON dbo.CustomerContact rebuildAfter I do this, what will I see for the index status? See possible answers