Raw Materials - The Little Engine that Could
Total Information Awareness can destroy your sanity. Get used to it.
Speeding up database access - part 4 Fixing expensive queries
Part 4 of a series from Matt Perdeck on speeding up your database access. This is a great series for developers. This is based on the book ASP.NET Site Performance Secrets.
Displaying Multiple Series on an SSRS Chart using Chart Area
A report might contain multiple data series on a chart, which can have considerably varying scales but common category groups. In such cases where this a big difference in scales, the data series with the lower scale can become obscured. In this tip we will take a look at how to solve this problem using Chart Areas.
A Look Back at Apple
With the resignation of Steve Jobs from Apple this week, Steve Jones looks back at his memories of the tech icon.
CONTEXT_INFO() and the SQL Calling Stack
Nothing new for many developers, but I still like the way you can maintain the stack throughout the call chain.
Specialists or Generalists: Who are best as Developers?
Should we have specialists or generalists working as developers in our companies? A guest editorial today from Mike Angelastro asks the question.
Mimicking Magnetic Tape in SQL
The sequential nature of early data storage devices such as punched card and magnetic tape once forced programmers to devise algorithms that made the best of sequential access. These ways of doing data-processing have become so entrenched that they are still used in modern relational database systems. There is now a better way, as Joe Celko explains.
Would You Rather Work for a Strong or Weak Manager?
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren. Andy asks if you prefer to have a strong manager or weak one, and why.
Optimize a SQL Server Analysis Services Measure Group Partition for Performance
In this tip you will learn how to design aggregations for a partition and optimize it for performance.
Solution
Keep Data Forever
Today Steve Jones talks about some of the issues with keeping data around a long time and a new archival medium.
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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