Building a Support Ticket Triage Report with IIF() and CHOOSE() in SQL Server
Learn how to use CHOOSE() and IIF() to validate priorities and return easy to read messages to the user.
Communication, For Incidents and Life
Many years ago, I was on call for a production system. This was common for me since I was one of several production DBA’s for the company. It was a normal weekend for me, and I got up and started playing with my kids. They were heavily into trains, and we were laying out our […]
How to Create an Alert in the Microsoft Fabric Warehouse
We are building a new data platform with Microsoft Fabric and we’re using the warehouse for our “gold layer”. We don’t have real-time ingestion or analytic requirements, but we have a use case where we want to send an alert if a certain threshold is reached. Ideally, the alert is sent when a SQL query returns a result set.
Reusing Customer Specific Order Filtering Logic with CROSS APPLY and an Inline TVF (Part 4)
In part 4 of this series, we look at using CROSS APPLY to filter in a function.
Training the next generation
Many years ago, I started at a smaller-sized company. About 150 employees; it was a SaaS company that provided survey software. It was growing quickly, and I was the primary DBA. I was hired not only to be a DBA, but to build a DB team to handle many of the issues the company faced […]
What happens when your AI coding agent starts a database on its own
How to build an app through an LLM: switching from CoPilot to Claude, a directional term-lookup feature
Risk Vs Reward, The never ending ROI discussion.
This week I hosted T-SQL Tuesday. This monthly event suggests a topic for bloggers to write about. It’s been going on for many years, and you can find more details here. https://tsqltuesday.com/ For my specific post, you can find the summaries here. T-SQL Tuesday #203 — Summary/Follow up I’ve spent 20+ years being asked questions about […]
I Struggle
This one is going to involve a lot of honesty & self-reflection. Run now. You've been warned. I know for a fact that I'm blessed. I'm healthy. I have a loving family. There are friends out there happy to see me when we meet. I've got one of the single greatest jobs ever. I live […]
The SQL Server Date Magic: When CAST and CONVERT Keep Your Index Seek
This article shows two scenarios, tested independently, with the full scripts and the real numbers from each run.
Explanation of SQL Server IO and Latches
I eventually found an explanation for this error message that, while not completely satisfactory, did lead me to diagnose wider-reaching I/O issues on the affected instance and led me to a better understanding of latching in general.
Blogs
The #MS_DatabaseConnector## Role: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I had seen these roles in various instances, but never dug into the new...
Asking for Help Isn’t a Weakness
By Brian Kelley
During COVID, I attended training on software/enterprise architecture given by Mark Richards. One of...
The Proof of the Backup Is in the Pudding
For me, the objective is straightforward: have a backup strategy that is reliable, understandable,...
Forums
Pay for Performance
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Pay for Performance, which is...
Access + ODBC Driver 18 + SQL Server 2025: ~150–250 ms per request
Has anyone encountered recurring request latency when using Microsoft Access with SQL Server 2025...
The ##MS_DatabaseConnector## User
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The ##MS_DatabaseConnector## User
Question of the Day
The ##MS_DatabaseConnector## User
On SQL Server 2025, I run this code as a sysadmin:
CREATE LOGIN Demo WITH PASSWORD = 'Demo1234567' GO ALTER SERVER ROLE ##MS_DatabaseConnector## ADD MEMBER Demo GOI then login as Demo and run this:
USE sandbox go SELECT CURRENT_USERWhat is returned? See possible answers