A certification doesn't imply a high level of expertise - only a certain baseline of competence as it applies to a specific area. For example, a "certified BMW mechanic" is...

Here is a good one. Not only does it reveal a lot of the candidate's experience and problem solving skills, but it can lead to an even more revealing back...

Whether it feels like a failed experiment or a personal failure has a lot to do with who else observed it. I think it's the nature of IT folks to...

Next April 1, tell us how to e-file our taxes from a stored procedure.

Not only is provisioning databases in Azure quick and simple, but billing and scaling in terms of DTU and RU/s is such a game changer that organization who are still...

Securing data in a warehouse is an often overlooked topic. Rather than granting wholesale access of tables to an entire IT department, group level permissions should be based on functional...

I like that chart Jeff, I might add it to my favourite argument I trot out every time I am faced with a short password requirement that forces numbers,...

Regarding best practice for password complexity: it depends on whether it's only used only for authentication (ie: Netflix) - or if it's leveraged for symmetric key encryption and there is...

So, we maintain a collection of PowerShell modules in a shared Git repository for performing operational tasks like failing over an AOG node, starting/stopping traces, or enabling/disabling features. PowerShell is...

I think it's a TV trope that a clever hacker can somehow guess your password or brute force it with a script. What's really going on is that folks re-use...

About Fusion restaurants: it's pretty rare for them to do everything (or even most things) at a master chef level.

I've never worked with CosmosDB, so I don't speak...

"I'd love to be able to insert data into a table, have it not available as a live value until committed on other nodes, and avoid locking my table. I...

I think of CosmosDB as like a fusion restaurant at an international airport where you can order from the menu of your choice (table, document, key store, graph, etc.) using...

Here is my take on IoT devices:

IoT has revolutionized industries like: manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, and science. Since this article was originally posted in 2017, I have since installed a Ring...

Yes, at a minimum developers should set "Encrypt=true" property in client connection string, and even better the DBA should install a proper SSL certificate in SQL Server and set option...