Creating vs. Maintaining
When you create something, do you think about the future? Steve asks the question today.
A Practical Guide to Using Azure Key Vault in Enterprise Deployments
Key vaults define security boundaries for stored secrets. It allows you to securely store service or application credentials like passwords and access keys as secrets. All secrets in your key vault are encrypted with a software key. When you use Key Vault, you no longer need to store security information in your applications. Not having to store security information in applications eliminates the need to make this information part of the code.
The Era of Cloned Humans
AI has tremendous possibilities but also a number of security issues. Steve highlights one scary security issue today.
Add and Subtract Dates using DATEADD in SQL Server
Date manipulation is a common scenario when retrieving or storing data in a Microsoft SQL Server database. There are several date functions (DATENAME, DATEPART, DATEADD, DATEDIFF, etc.) that are available and in this tutorial, we look at how to use the DATEADD function in SQL queries, stored procedures, T-SQL scripts, etc. for OLTP databases as well as data warehouse and data science projects.
Technical Pain Behaviors
In my family’s history of the past 10+ years, we have become well versed in nagging, ongoing, non-debilitating pain. In some ways, the lessons we have learned about physical pain correlate all too well to the types of pain that we technical people are involved with daily. But there is a huge difference, even if […]
Boosting Data Accuracy: Resolving Common Data Quality Issues Using SQL
Poor data quality significantly hinders large enterprises from deriving meaningful value. The variety of data is a crucial factor to account for when assessing & rectifying data quality, as diverse data types introduce unique challenges in maintaining accuracy and consistency. Good data quality and integrity are essential for accurate insights, good decision-making, and potential success of large enterprises. Inconsistent, incomplete, and inaccurate data significantly affect business operations, customer satisfaction, and financial performance. SQL provides robust functions to proactively identify and resolve these data quality issues, ensuring accurate, reliable, and consistent data for reporting and analysis.
Can You Become a More Productive Engineer?
Steve has a few thoughts on becoming more effective. This involves more than just becoming a better coder.
Oracle Architecture Overview
In this document I will share an overview of Oracle’s architecture that isn’t complete, but it will give you a basic understanding of how the architecture works, especially if you are coming from other database platforms.
The AI Budget Assistant
Most of us don't work on budgets, but we are affected by them. Is it a good idea for IT management to use AI to help plan their budgets? Steve has a few thoughts today.
Why Standards are Important
There is something in the tech mindset that simultaneously loves and loathes a standard. Having standards is important, what those standards are is less so.
Blogs
In-Person CISA Training – April 13-16, 2026
By Brian Kelley
I will be leading an in-person Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) exam prep class...
EightKB 2026
EightKB is back again for 2026! The biggest online SQL Server internals conference is...
The FinOps Lifecycle: From Budgeting to Reporting
By HeyMo0sh
Working in DevOps long enough teaches you two universal truths: That’s exactly why I...
Forums
query to track time spent on individual tasks in SSIS
Hi everyone I am looking at building a query to determine how much time...
SQL Server Transactional Replication from Always On Availability Groups to Azure SQL Database
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Transactional Replication from...
Hidden Heroes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Hidden Heroes
Question of the Day
Identities and Sequences I
When thinking of the Identity property for auto incrementing columns and sequences for the same action, which are explicitly linked to increment a number in a table when a new row is added?
See possible answers