The Battlefield of Your Career
If you want to actively manage your career and drive it forward, Steve has some advice.
DevOps 101: What, who, why and how?
More and more organizations are turning to DevOps as a way of working together to improve the efficiency and quality of software delivery, and increase value to the business. But what exactly is DevOps and what does it mean for you and your organization?
When to use CHAR, VARCHAR, or VARCHAR(MAX)
It’s important to choose the right datatypes when designing a database. Greg Larsen explains the differences between CHAR, VARCHAR and VARCHAR(MAX).
Joining a Community
In the last week I've been actively trying to join the PostgreSQL community. It's been an interesting experience. I suspect it's going to stay interesting for a while. As part of what I'm doing, I saw this excellent video from Ryan Booz, talking about joining a new community. It got me to thinking. You have […]
Do You Still Use CHAR?
When designing a database, choosing good datatypes is important, but not necessarily all the time. Today Steve wonders if you still use fixed sting data types.
SQL Server Development Using Free Tools
You can make SQL Server database development faster and easier with a FREE toolkit!
Reporting on the Progress of a Flyway Database Development Project
This article demos a novel way to report on the progress of your Flyway development project. It provides both SQL and PowerShell versions of code that extracts information for each database version from the Flyway schema history table and then plots it in a Gantt chart.
Vertipaq optimization and its impact on columnstore compression
Vertipaq optimization is a critical component of the columnstore compression process. Edward Pollack explains how it works and what you need to know to manage it.
The Cloud as a Foundation
The innovations and possibilities of cloud computing are exciting to Steve.
Share your insights and help shape the Summit 2022 program
We want to hear from you! Tell us what's important to you by sharing your insights and preferences for PASS Data Community Summit 2022. Community feedback is at the heart of everything we do for Summit and your insights will help guide our planning for this year's conference, taking place online and in-person in Seattle, November 15 - 18, 2022.
Blogs
Monday Monitor Tips: Intelligent Alert Thresholds
By Steve Jones
At the recent Redgate Summit in Chicago, I demo’d (lightly) the ML based Alert...
A New Word: los vidados
By Steve Jones
los vidados – n. the half-remembered acquaintances you knew years ago, who you might...
In-Person CISA Training – April 13-16, 2026
By Brian Kelley
I will be leading an in-person Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) exam prep class...
Forums
String_agg not working as needed
I'm trying to get this string_agg to put all the 'comments' into one result...
Vectors in SQL Server 2025
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Vectors in SQL Server 2025
Odd Sequences
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Odd Sequences
Question of the Day
Odd Sequences
What values are returned from this code?
CREATE SEQUENCE NumericSequence
AS NUMERIC(5,1)
START WITH 1.0
INCREMENT BY 0.1;
GO
SELECT NEXT VALUE FOR NumericSequence
GO
SELECT NEXT VALUE FOR NumericSequence
GO See possible answers