The Improvement Limit
How much of a difference can you make at a job? Steve has a few thoughts today.
2025-10-13
100 reads
How much of a difference can you make at a job? Steve has a few thoughts today.
2025-10-13
100 reads
You're going to have to bear with me on this one because my thoughts aren't fully formed. As I'm sure I've mentioned, I'm a little elderly (and you thought I was going to talk about radios). As such, I've seen the death of a few technologies. I may not have shared this widely, but my […]
2025-10-11
150 reads
The best way to improve your database performance is with better code. We all know that, but few of us actually end up making those changes.
2025-10-10 (first published: 2017-11-16)
586 reads
When you must rollback a deployment of changes, is that a failure of the process? The development effort? Or something else?
2025-10-08 (first published: 2014-03-04)
297 reads
When should a DBA get fired? Steve Jones thinks it should be rare and gives you two cases.
2025-10-06 (first published: 2014-03-27)
690 reads
The Koi Security team recently uncovered the first known, malicious MCP server in the wild: a package called postmark-mcp, downloaded over 1,500 times per week, that silently BCCs every outgoing email to an attacker-controlled domain. So, what happened? High-level, a lot: The attacker cloned the legitimate Postmark MCP repository, made one small but nefarious change […]
2025-10-04
156 reads
2025-10-03
82 reads
Adopting a modern development approach brings with it the need to manage PRs, which Steve thinks can be like trouble tickets.
2025-10-01
112 reads
2025-09-29
161 reads
AI has moved from experimental to operational in record time for many organizations. In industries like fintech, healthcare, and retail where sensitive PII (personally identifiable information) and relational databases are the backbone of daily operations, this innovation speed to adopt AI brings enormous opportunity, but also significant risks
2025-09-27
63 reads
By Steve Jones
If you aren’t watching the Ignite keynotes today, then you might have missed the...
Short version You want to get this running as fast as possible. Do these...
By Steve Jones
Last week I asked you to write about SQL Server 2025 and what things...
Hi everyone, I’m working with some old SSIS 2005 packages, and I’m trying to...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The case for "Understanding our...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Specifying the Collation
I am dealing with issues on my SQL Server 2022 instance related to collation. I have an instance collation of Latin1_General_CS_AS_KS_WS, but a database collation of Latin1_General_CI_AS. I want to force a few queries to run with a specified collation by using code like this:
DECLARE @c VARCHAR(20) = 'Latin1_General_CI_AS'
SELECT p.PersonType,
p.Title,
p.LastName,
c.CustomerID,
c.AccountNumber
FROM Person.Person AS p
INNER JOIN Sales.Customer AS c
ON c.PersonID = p.BusinessEntityID
COLLATE @c
Will this solve my problem? See possible answers