Using the Lightweight Tools
This week Steve is interested in whether the newer lightweight environments, like VS Code and Azure Data Studio, are capturing your interest.
2023-06-12 (first published: 2019-12-19)
864 reads
Editorials
Software Flexibility (Avoiding the next hack)
As computer scientists, it often feels like our job is to tell the business user, "No, we can't do that because the software you asked for, and we built, doesn't allow it ..." Then, after a long and relatively silly meeting where your soul dies a little, the business user typically gets 80% of what […]
2023-06-10
103 reads
2023-06-09
157 reads
Creating Test Data
This editorial was originally published on Jan 9, 2020. It is being re-run as Steve is out of town. Test data is hard to come by, and I agree with Brent Ozar: " I get so frustrated when I hear trainers/presenters/bloggers/idealists talk about how developers should be using purpose-built-from-scratch data sets with no real customer […]
2023-06-07 (first published: 2020-01-09)
494 reads
How Many Days Can You Survive?
A disaster in LA affected many companies, some of which were innocent bystanders to the event. Steve talks about the need to have some plans in place.
2023-06-05
126 reads
Trust!
The difference between a low trust society (few individuals within a trust circle outside your family and/or tribe) and a high trust society (general trust of individuals beyond immediate family/tribe associations) generally speaking can be measured as the difference between a low tech (low trust) and high tech (high trust) society. Yes, exceptions abound, but […]
2023-06-03
103 reads
Better Communication Through Less Messaging
Steve notes that sometimes we message too often, but that's a human problem, not a tool issue.
2023-06-02
147 reads
Scaling Up Monitoring
How do we design a monitoring system? The Amazon Prime team realized they didn't do a good job and changed their architecture.
2023-05-31
172 reads
2023-05-29
114 reads
Validating Password Expiration
Steve notes that password expiration is important for SQL Logins, but he knows this isn't always configured when logins are created, or checked later to see if it is still enabled.
2023-05-27
564 reads
Blogs
What DevOps Look Like in Microsoft Fabric
By HeyMo0sh
Microsoft Fabric (not to be confused with the more general term “fabric” in DevOps)...
T-SQL Tuesday #192: What career risks have you taken?
By James Serra
I’m honored to be hosting T-SQL Tuesday — edition #192. For those who may...
AI: Blog a Day – Day 3: LLM Models – Open Source vs Closed Source
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 2 , we learned introduction on Generative AI and Agentic AI,...
Forums
Can an Azure App Service Managed Identity be used for SQL Login?
I'm fairly certain I know the answer to this from digging into it yesterday,...
Azure Synapse database refresh
Hi Team, I am trying to refresh the Azure Synapse Dedicated pool from production...
how to write this query?
hi everyone I am not sure how to write the query that will produce...
Question of the Day
Fun with JSON I
I have some data in a table:
CREATE TABLE #test_data
(
id INT PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(100),
birth_date DATE
);
-- Step 2: Insert rows
INSERT INTO #test_data
VALUES
(1, 'Olivia', '2025-01-05'),
(2, 'Emma', '2025-03-02'),
(3, 'Liam', '2025-11-15'),
(4, 'Noah', '2025-12-22');
If I run this query, how many rows are returned?
SELECT *
FROM OPENJSON(
(
SELECT t.* FROM #test_data AS t FOR JSON PATH
)
) t; See possible answers