Internal Staff Growth
How do you approach adding to your team? Steve asks if you look internally or externally as a default.
2025-11-12
88 reads
Editorials
Do You Really Need HA?
Steve asks the question about whether or not a particular environment really needs HA implemented.
2025-11-10
162 reads
Economics of AI: What is the Real Cost to Profit?
Artificial intelligence is everywhere: It’s in our tools, our workflows, our marketing pitches…and increasingly, in our bottom lines. But a thought-provoking article published recently on the AI bubble asks a far more sobering question: What’s it really going to cost to profit from AI? Many people will roll their eyes and say, “Isn’t that obvious? […]
2025-11-08
109 reads
Poor Name Choice
Steve has a few thoughts on the names we choose for tables, columns, files, and more.
2025-11-07
153 reads
Data > Hype
Most of us believe in the importance of data. Steve has a few thoughts on using data to determine if AI is helpful.
2025-11-05
92 reads
Practice Until You Don't Get It Wrong
We will all make mistakes, but practice can help reduce the errors we cause.
2025-11-03 (first published: 2017-11-27)
305 reads
The Selfish Case for Learning AI
Steve has a good reason to spend time working with and learning about AI technology.
2025-10-31
148 reads
Reducing Cloud Cost
Cloud costs are high and growing. Some orgs think they're out of control and are trying to limit spend. Some orgs are looking to leave the cloud. A lot of IT spend over the years has been seen as a cost center, with many executives trying to limit the growth or spend, even while they […]
2025-10-29
196 reads
DevOps is DevOps
DevOps includes a lot of practices, but no matter which technology that you use, the ideas are the same.
2025-10-27
137 reads
Why Data Modelling Still Matters - More Than Ever
In today’s fast-paced landscape, where agile development and cloud-native platforms dominate, data modelling might seem like a relic of the past.
2025-10-25
255 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