In a world of always-on learning and the relentless march of tech evolution, podcasts emerged as a quiet revolution in how I consume information. I’ve been part of several podcasts this year, including recording one earlier today with Ed Roske for the Oracle community. As a data professional and technical specialist, for me they’re more […]
2025-07-24
115 reads
Oracle treats most DDL as auto-committing, meaning once it executes, it's done. SQL Server, however, blurs that line in fascinating ways, allowing some DDL operations to be part of an explicit transaction.
2025-07-23
303 reads
The data professional’s world is changing and I know you hear this from me in editorials, blogs posts and social media, but it’s the truth. With the rise of Microsoft Fabric, we’re not just seeing another platform shift; we’re witnessing a redefinition of how data is valued, governed, and protected across the enterprise. Fabric isn’t […]
2025-07-22
255 reads
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
103 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
122 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
105 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
166 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
98 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
227 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
143 reads
By Steve Jones
I recently started playing with the MCP Server for SQL Server, which is a...
If you spend your days tuning queries, managing pipelines, or keeping a production database...
I’ve been rebuilding my three-site SQL Server demo lab, and I ran into something...
Has anyone written a wrapper function (or similar) around STRING_AGG() to allow the retrieval...
Putting this here as we're currently on SQL Server 2019 installed on Windows Server...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Never is Not the Policy
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