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
AI Helps Me with My Sloppiness
By Steve Jones
I type fairly well. Well, I type fast, but I do wear out a...
Automatic Index Compaction
By ReviewMyDB
Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend....
The Goldilocks problem – Materialized Views
I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but...
Forums
SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
How We Handled a Vendor Retry That Loaded Twice in Snowflake
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How We Handled a Vendor...
Cognitive Coverage
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Cognitive Coverage
Question of the Day
Getting the Average
I have this data in the dbo.Commission table in a SQL Server 2022 database.
salesperson commission Brian 12 Brian 16 Andy 7 Andy 14 Andy 21 Steve 20 Steve NULLAll the data is a varchar, and I decide to run this query to get the totals for each salesperson.
SELECT SalesPerson
, AVG(TRY_PARSE(Commission AS int)) AS TotalCommission
FROM commission
GROUP BY SalesPerson
GO
What average commission is calculated for Steve? See possible answers