Introduction of Azure SQL Hyperscale: Stairway to Azure SQL Hyperscale Level 1
In Level 1 of the Stairway to Azure SQL Hyperscale, we learn about the architecture and create a hyperscale instance.
How to Script Dimensions with data build tool (dbt) Macros
In this article, we’ll revisit the dimension models we created. We wrote the entire SQL statement for the dimension by hand, and the dimensions themselves were very rudimentary; they lacked a surrogate key and there were no audit columns (such as insert date and update date). We’ll show you how we can expand the dimensions using Jinja, but also how we can minimize development effort by baking reusable patterns into the Jinja code.
Advanced SQL Server Page Forensics: Detecting Page Splits and Allocations with DBCC PAGE
Page splits are an often-overlooked performance killer in SQL Server. In this article, we take a forensic look at how serial inserts differ from mid-table inserts, revealing why inserting rows out of order causes hidden page splits, increased IO, and fragmentation. Using a wide-column table, we demonstrate both scenarios and decode their impact with page-level analysis.
Deprecated but Forgotten: Why SQL Server’s Text, NText, and Image Data Types Still Haunt Your Systems
TEXT, NTEXT, and IMAGE columns have been deprecated for nearly two decades, yet they still silently haunt many SQL Server environments. This article explains their hidden limitations with practical demos and shows why migrating to VARCHAR(MAX), NVARCHAR(MAX), and VARBINARY(MAX) is critical for modern performance, maintainability, and future upgrades.
How to Access and Use Azure Key Vault Secrets in an Azure Devops Pipeline
When you run a CI/CD pipeline, you often need confidential values like passwords, authentication tokens, service principal secrets etc. when you want to deploy a certain artefact. You don’t want to store those secrets directly in your pipelines as this might pose a considerable security leak. Instead, you either store them as secret variables, or […]
How to create your custom GPT SQL Expert
Introduction ChatGPT includes custom GPTs. You can create your own custom GPT. In this article, we will demonstrate how to create a custom GPT expert in SQL Server. Requirements To create your own GPT, you need to use the paid version of ChatGPT. First, go to ChatGPT. Secondly, if you don’t have the paid version, […]
How to safely and surgically restore filegroups
Most DBAs are familiar with full and differential ...
Model Context Protocol (MCP): A Developer’s Guide to Long-Context LLM Integration
Large Language Models (LLMs) like Anthropic’s Cl...
MongoDB and NodeJS in action
Overview MongoDB is a popular NoSQL database used for building modern, scalable applications. In this article, we’ll cover how to set up MongoDB on Windows and connect to it using Node.js. We will also perform some basic Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations to ensure we understand fully on how Node.js can be made […]
Blogs
Presenting with Visual Studio Code
A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in...
Advice I Like: In 100 Years
By Steve Jones
In 100 years a lot of what we take to be true now will...
dataMinds Saturday 2026 – Slides
At Saturday the 21st of February I’m presenting an introduction to dimensional modelling at...
Forums
Safe and Reliable Transport of Farm Machinery: Solutions of the Modern Agricultu
Ship A1 Auto Transport is a reliable provider of services who delivers safe and...
is it true we cant debug c# scripts in ssis anymore under vs
Hi, i'm running vs2022. I'm trying out a c# script that i'd like to...
Question of the Day
Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance
I upgraded a SQL Server 2019 instance to SQL Server 2025. I wanted to test the fuzzy string search functions. I run this code:
SELECT JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE('tim', 'tom')
I get this error message:Msg 195, Level 15, State 10, Line 1 'JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE' is not a recognized built-in function name.What is wrong? See possible answers