What’s New in SSMS 22
SSMS 22 has several new features. Is there a compilation list of the new features? How will these features help me as a SQL Server professional?
A Full Shutdown
Steve used to shut down systems to upgrade them, but lately he makes changes while they're running.
Going Native with Fabric Spark Pools: The Fabric Modern Data Platform
The next installment of the Fabric Modern Data Platform looks at Spark pools for executing code.
Getting Started with mssql-python for Data Developers
rogrammatic interaction with SQL Server or Azure SQL from a Python script is possible using a driver. A popular driver has been pyodbc that can be used standalone or with a SQLAlchemy wrapper. SQLAlchemy on its own is the Python SQL toolkit and Object Relational Mapper for developers. In the end of 2025 Microsoft released v1 of their own Python SQL driver called mssql-python. How do you get started using mssql-python for programmatic access to your SQL Server?
Designing Delta Tables with Liquid Clustering: Real-World Patterns for Data Engineers
Get a short introduction to Liquid Clustering in Databricks.
Fun with JSON
Last year, I used a lot of JSON to exchange data between systems. There are several ways to extract data from a JSON file, but there is one specific, probably less-used possibility that I’d like to highlight. For one project, I received JSON files containing a variable number of parameters and their values. If I […]
Not Just an Upgrade
Choosing to upgrade isn't as simple as many of us would like. Steve has a few thoughts today on the decision to move to a new version of a database server.
SQL Server Long-Running Query Detection: How to Find and Monitor Slow Queries
Monitoring and alerting can be overwhelming tasks, especially for those new to the world of managing production data. One common challenge for any data professional is the identification and management of queries that run for longer than they should.
Metadata Driven Pipelines (Incremental Load): The Fabric Modern Data Platform
This article will use the incremental data load pattern to load data in our raw zone tables.
Why End-User Testing Is Even More Important with AI
I don’t think I’m alone in this frustration, but it crystallized for me recently while trying to do something that should have taken less than two minutes: check in for a flight. What followed was a cascade of app switching and authentication failures. I started in my favorite travel app, moved to one airline app, […]
Blogs
5 Starter Projects for Your AI and Data Engineering Portfolio
Reading tutorials is fine. Shipping something is better. If you are trying to break...
The Book of Redgate: Taking Breaks
By Steve Jones
We work hard at Redgate, though with a good work-life balance. One interesting observation...
Database AI Agents: The Read-Only Rule
By Arun Sirpal
Fourth in a series on Ai and databases. What Read-Only Advisory Actually Means A...
Forums
Liability for AI Errors
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Liability for AI Errors
Running a Parameter-Sensitive Stored Procedure on a Secondary Replica
Hello , I would like to run a stored procedure on a secondary replica...
Pro SQL Server Internals
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Pro SQL Server Internals
Question of the Day
Running SQLCMD II
I run this command to start SQLCMD:
sqlcmd -S localhost -E -c "proceed"At the prompt, I type this (the 1> and 2> are prompts):
1> select @@version 2> goWhat happens? See possible answers