What Happened to Hadoop?
For a time, it seemed that everyone wanted to build a Hadoop system. The world has changed, and that's not as popular an idea as it used to be. Today, Steve has a few thoughts.
Get Your Scalar UDFs to Run Faster Without Code Changes
Microsoft has added a group of features called Intelligent Query Processing to SQL Server 2017 and 2019. In this article, Greg Larsen explains one of the features, Scalar UDF Inlining.
New release: Mask SQL Server data 3x faster with Data Masker 7
In the latest version of Data Masker for SQL Server, it’s now much easier to rapidly identify sensitive data that needs masking, set up appropriate rules, see which masking rules are applied to which column, and locate what sensitive data you've yet to mask.
We’ve also improved the performance of commonly used masking rules, which lets you run masking operations 3 times faster.
Automatic Redaction of PII
Amazon is providing automatic redaction of PII data in there transcription service.
Mean Median Mode using SQL and DAX
This article explains how to calculate the important statistical functions, MEAN, MEDIAN, and MODE, in both T-SQL and DAX.
Reviewing Your Past Efforts
Today Steve starts a mid year review of his career goals and encourages you to do the same.
Enterprise Insights from the 2020 State of Database DevOps report
17% of Enterprise respondents in this year's State of Database DevOps survey reported that DevOps has been adopted across all projects in their organization. This year’s State of Database DevOps report gave us some great insights into the landscape of Database DevOps. Kendra Little walks us through those insights specific to Enterprise organizations.
Introduction to Azure SQL Database Auto-Failover Groups
Azure SQL Database offers a number of resiliency features that deliver a mix of high availability and disaster recovery capabilities
New: 2020 State of Database DevOps report
Now in it’s 4th year, the State of Database DevOps report continues to deliver valuable insights. In the report, you will learn multiple tactics to improve the quality of database code deployment, whether it is by changing the type of environment used for development, enhancing your code review practices, or your change management/approval practices.
Data Orchestration
Steve talks data virtualization in the age of growing data sets and larger workloads
Blogs
Programmatic Tool Calling with the Claude SDK
Programmatic Tool Calling with the Claude SDK Every morning somebody on the team runs the...
A New Word: Mauerbauertraurigkeit
By Steve Jones
mauerbauertraurigkeit – n. inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends whose company...
Methodology for dealing with bad data in production
By Brian Kelley
Pinal Dave wrote up his methodology for what to do when you discover bad...
Forums
Why SQL Server Database Attach fails and how to repair it
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Why SQL Server Database Attach...
Fixing P1 Queries
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Fixing P1 Queries
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT() IV
In SQL Server 2025, I run this code:
select bit_count('A')
What is returned? See possible answers