Install SQL Server and Oracle using PowerShell and Windows Containers
In this article we look at how to install SQL Server and Oracle using PowerShell to create development environments using Windows Containers.
Defining DevOps
Many people ask about DevOps and what it entails. Steve has a few thoughts on the challenges of adopting DevOps in a company.
How to Integrate Azure DevOps with Azure Synapse Studio
Learn how to connect your Synapse workspace to a Git repository.
Crowdsourcing quality: Can the hive mind/herd mentality help you in software testing?
Crowdsourcing is one way to get a job done. In this article, Devyani Borade describes crowdsourcing quality testing of software.
Testing a Flyway Database Migration
Often, we want to test the new version of a database, produced by a Flyway migration, before committing the new migration file, or to test the same migration run on a number of different databases. This article demonstrates how to do it, by generating and using JSON parameter files to run a series of Flyway actions on any number of databases, on any number of servers.
Knowing When to Respond
I ran into this quote on the Microsoft Learn site, which I thought was a great way to think about how to administer a system: "Without a baseline, every issue encountered could be considered normal and therefore not require any additional intervention." When I've had users file tickets or complain about things not working well, […]
Working with Fail Activity in Azure Data Factory
Introduction In this article, we will talk about a newly introduced activity in Azure Data Factory, which is the fail activity. The fail activity is very useful to stop or fail the pipeline at the specified point. For example, a lookup activity might return no data or a switch activity executes the default block. We […]
Exploring the Flyway Schema History Table
Flyway uses a schema history table to track the version of each database, recording in it every versioned migration file applied to build that version. It's worth understanding exactly how Flyway uses this table, the possible dangers of moving it to a non-default location and how to do it safely, if required.
How to replace an identity column with a sequence number
SQL Server provides two ways to include an incrementing number in a table. Greg Larsen explains how to replace an identity column with a sequence number.
Blogs
RANK() vs DENSE_RANK(): #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I haven’t done one of these in awhile, but I saw an article recently...
Using CAT for Testing of Data Agents
In last months one of the scenarios where you can use AI has been...
Forums
Creating JSON II
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Engineer Lessons
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Question of the Day
Creating JSON II
On SQL Server 2025, what happens when I run this code:
SELECT JSON_OBJECTAGG( N'City':N'Denver' RETURNING JSON) GOSee possible answers