The Growth of Data Types
This week Steve Jones asks you what you think will make up the majority of your future databases? Will it be numerical data or will some other type come to dominate?
Configure SQL Server Database Mirroring Using SSMS
This tip outlines a test environment and then walks through the process of setting up Database Mirroring. This includes the configurations, backups, restores and verification process.
Recovery Models
Learn the basics of recovery models in this short article from SQL Server guru and MVP, Gail Shaw.
Where Do You Park?
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren. Most people work in an office and need to commute, which brings with it the inevitable fight for parking in many companies. How is it handled for you?
Preventing Problems in SQL Server
It is never a good idea to let your users be the ones to tell you of database server outages. It is far better to be able to spot potential problems by being alerted for the most relevant conditions on your servers at the best threshold. This will take time and patience, but the reward will be an alerting system which allows you to deal more effectively with issues before they involve system down-time.
Stairway to Data, Level 8: Data Encoding Schemes - Part II
Joe discusses Hierarchical, Vector and Concatenation encoding before rounding up with general guidelines for designing encoding schemes.
The Special Cloud
Amazon has built a cloud just for the US government. Will we see more specialized clouds in the future that might let us move some of our data to the cloud?
How to Performance Tune the Microsoft SQL Server tempdb Database
If your SQL Server’s tempdb database is heavily used by your application(s), consider locating it on an array of its own (such as RAID 1 or RAID 10). This will allow disk I/O to be more evenly distributed, reducing disk I/O contention issues, and speeding up SQL Server’s overall performance.
An Investment in Knowledge
Inspired by a quote from Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jones talks about investing in your career.
Blogs
Narrow Task Decomposition in AI Pipeline Agents
A nightly load into sales_fact fails. Ask an orchestrating agent to break down the...
Car Update: August 2026
By Steve Jones
It’s been some time since I provided a car update, so I decided to...
Microsoft Fabric OneLake Shortcuts: When to Use Them and When Not To
By James Serra
An architecture scenario Imagine separate Sales, Finance, Shared Data, and Executive Analytics workspaces. Sales...
Forums
Searching for my own posts
I have a really stupid question... Is there an easy way to search for...
How to Work with On-Premises AI Models to Generate T-SQL Code
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Work with On-Premises...
Escaping Strings
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Escaping Strings
Question of the Day
Escaping Strings
The STRING_ESCAPE() function requires 2 parameters in SQL Server 2025. The first is a string of text and the second is the type of escape rules being used. What are the options for the second parameter?
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