How Do the Experts Become Experts?
How do the experts get to that level? A few thoughts today in a guest editorial from Kathi Kellenberger.
SSMS Copilot is Messing With Your AI Prompts
You might notice that the advice you get from Copilot in SSMS isn’t very good, but it isn’t necessarily AI in general. Part of the problem is something specific about SSMS Copilot and the way it prompts LLMs, and I wish I could tell you exactly what it is, but I can’t because I don’t have access to how SSMS is changing your prompts.
Vector Search in SQL Server 2025: Storing Embeddings, Querying Them, and What to Watch Out For
This article shows how you can generate embeddings in SQL Server 2025, store them, and use them in your queries.
Microsoft are retiring role-based certifications. Here’s why they shouldn’t
In this Simple Talk opinion piece, Microsoft certification veteran Dr Greg Low considers – and shares his thoughts on – the recent announcement that many role-based Microsoft certifications are being retired.
The Data Model Matters
Is a data model important in modern software? Steve thinks it is and gives a few reasons why we might want to spend a little time on ensuring we have good models as we build software.
Understanding SQL Server PARTITION BY with Examples
Introduction When developers first learn SQL aggregation, they usually start with the GROUP BY clause. It works well for summary reports because it combines multiple rows into a single result for each group. For example, you can calculate total sales per region or average salary per department. The limitation of GROUP BY appears when you […]
Complex Data Processing with dbt Python Models: The Fabric Modern Data Platform
Data build tool (dbt) is an open-source command line tool that helps engineers transform data using SQL scripts. However, there are limitations to what can be done with the Structure Query Language (SQL). That is where dbt Python models can be used to perform complex tasks. A dbt Python model is a function that reads […]
Blogs
Automatic Index Compaction
By ReviewMyDB
Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend....
The Goldilocks problem – Materialized Views
I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but...
Monday Monitor Tips: Virtual Machine Usage and Cost
By Steve Jones
One of the things I’ve been requesting for a number of years is cost...
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...
How We Handled a Vendor Retry That Loaded Twice in Snowflake
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How We Handled a Vendor...
Cognitive Coverage
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Cognitive Coverage
Question of the Day
Getting the Average
I have this data in the dbo.Commission table in a SQL Server 2022 database.
salesperson commission Brian 12 Brian 16 Andy 7 Andy 14 Andy 21 Steve 20 Steve NULLAll the data is a varchar, and I decide to run this query to get the totals for each salesperson.
SELECT SalesPerson
, AVG(TRY_PARSE(Commission AS int)) AS TotalCommission
FROM commission
GROUP BY SalesPerson
GO
What average commission is calculated for Steve? See possible answers