Liability for AI Errors
Who is liable for mistakes made when listening to AI tooling? In at least one case, Steve isn't sure.
SQL ART: Who's Blocking Who? Visualising SQL Server Blocking With Spatial Geometry
Taking SQL art from shamrocks and Easter eggs to something your DBA manager might actually care about. If you've been following my SQL spatial art series — shamrocks, Easter eggs, Christmas trees — you'll know I have a habit of finding increasingly creative misuses for SQL Server's geometry data type. Most of them have been […]
The Degradation of the Turing Test
Are computers getting smart enough to pass the Turing test or are humans getting worse at representing themselves as intelligent?
How data scientists work with PostgreSQL from Python (and how to write queries that don’t break at scale)
In this article, learn how PostgreSQL powers data science workflows, including query execution, performance optimization, indexing, data retrieval, and more.
SQL Saturday Austin 2026
SQL Saturday Austin 2026 is coming on Jun 27, 2026. A free day of networking, training, and inspiration. Register today and come spend a day with your peers.
Designing Database Changes Before Deployment: Level 1 of the Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments
Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments introduces a progressive approach to managing database changes with clear intent, predictable rollback, and explicit behavioral guarantees. Starting from change design and moving toward execution and coordination in complex environments, the Stairway provides a conceptual framework for deploying database changes safely and consistently, independent of specific tools or automation platforms.
Stairway to Reliable Database Deployment Level 3 – Rehearsing Changesets Across Environments
After defining the deployment contract in the previous level, this article focuses on validating a changeset before it reaches production. Rehearsal across environments ensures that execution order, rollback behavior, and baseline alignment all behave exactly as expected.
Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments Level 2 - Defining the Deployment Contract
Level 2 formalizes the behavioral guarantees that a changeset must provide in order to be safely deployed and rolled back. It introduces the deployment contract, checkpoint semantics, and the structural scope of Create and Rollback scripts. Data changes are addressed through a dedicated Update mechanism, with clear boundaries and limitations. By the end of this level, a changeset becomes a predictable and well-defined unit that can be reasoned about independently of execution context.
Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments Level 4 – Preparing for Production Deployment
This level examines how a rehearsed changeset is transformed into production-ready deployment artifacts. By consolidating scripts into controlled execution units and validating the resulting artifacts, the approach ensures that production deployment remains predictable and aligned with what was proven during rehearsal.
How Do the Experts Become Experts?
How do the experts get to that level? A few thoughts today in a guest editorial from Kathi Kellenberger.
Blogs
Demo for Parameter Sniffing and Memory Grant Feedback
Disclaimer: The following is built with Claude Code. Just need to justify my $100/mo...
My Social Media Rules
By Brian Kelley
I developed these rules a while back, before COVID. I had a period of...
Why Use TRY_PARSE(): #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
Someone asked why I would use TRY_PARSE after I posted a question at SQL...
Forums
Partitioning a table with TEXTIMAGE_ON option
I have a table that ends in ON [PRIMARY] TEXTIMAGE_ON [PRIMARY]. I'm about to...
OUTER APPLY Fundamentals: Part 2
Comments posted to this topic are about the item OUTER APPLY Fundamentals: Part 2
Building Great Software
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Building Great Software
Question of the Day
The Range of Customers
I have this data in the OrderHeader table in a SQL Server 2025 database (ordered by CustomerID ASC):
orderid orderdate customerid complete 3 2025-05-10 00:00:00.0002 1 21 2024-01-10 00:00:00.0003 1 15 2023-10-28 00:00:00.0004 1 13 2025-03-08 00:00:00.0006 1 11 2024-04-02 00:00:00.0007 1If I run this query, how many rows are returned?
SELECT * from dbo.OrderHeader where customerid between 3 and '6'See possible answers