SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About
Another fun article for America's Independence Day using SQL Server's spatial features.
How to stop AI hallucinations in enterprise RAG systems (a complete guide)
From the Air Canada chatbot lawsuit to the infamous Chevy dealership pricing fiasco, this article breaks down the six real reasons RAG systems fail in production – and the five architectural patterns high-performing AI teams use to make them trustworthy, grounded, and production-ready.
Cognitive Coverage
Understanding the scope of what AI and humans are changing in your code going to be an important part of your future as a tech professional.
How We Handled a Vendor Retry That Loaded Twice in Snowflake
The vendor file arrived twice overnight, Snowflake loaded both copies without complaining, and finance found the problem before the pipeline did.
Add New Disk to Windows Failover Cluster for SQL Server
I have a 2-node failover cluster instance running on Windows Server 2019 Standard edition. I have a requirement to add a new SAN disk to the SQL Server failover cluster instance (FCI), and then I need to move a user database to that newly added shared disk. Can you show the steps required to add a new disk to the FCI and move the user database?
Parameter Sniffing in Production: How a 200ms Query Became a 90-Second Outage
Learn how parameter sniffing appeared in a real system and how the issues were solved.
Never ship a broken semantic model again: how to build automated tests in Power BI with user-defined functions
User-defined functions (UDFs) in Power BI let you build reusable, automated tests for your semantic models — so you catch broken measures, duplicate rows, and faulty relationships before they reach your reports. This article walks through how to use UDFs alongside PQL.Assert to standardize testing across your team, and how to automate those tests with Power Automate or a Fabric Notebook.
Blogs
Power BI Performance in 2026: A Practical Guide to Faster Semantic Models and Reports
By James Serra
Originally published April 2022; substantially updated July 2026. This post is a complete replacement...
Getting Started with Azure SQL Developer on Macbook
The idea behind Azure SQL Developer is for anyone to build, iterate, and test...
AI Experiments: Claude Solved a DAB Issue
By Steve Jones
I’m sure many of you are using AI regularly, perhaps chatting, perhaps using some...
Forums
Can You Really Downgrade from Enterprise to Standard and Save Thousands? Here's What Happened
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What is CPU Usage?
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Limiting Checkpoints
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Question of the Day
Limiting Checkpoints
If I use the -k parameter with a number after it, what does this change in SQL Server?
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