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
Advice I Like: Respect
By Steve Jones
“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.” –...
Blue Sky Programming – The Optimism Trap
Many years ago, before I joined Oracle, I was working on a major modernisation...
Setting Up a Mac for Data Engineering and AI Work
If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac...
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...
locking down agent for new user on our dev machine
hi , a new user wants to be able to add sql agent jobs...
SQL Server Enum Implementation: A Single-Row View Strategy for Avoiding Magic Values
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Enum Implementation: A...
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT I
In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:
UserID UserPermissions 15 23 37What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount from dbo.UserPermission where UserID = 3;See possible answers