Interviews: What is ACID?
While thinking about interviews, Steve Jones shares a story of a job situation he encountered.
Stairway to U-SQL Level 17: Executing U-SQL Jobs with PowerShell
Automate your Data Lake with PowerShell! Learn how PowerShell can be used to execute U-SQL scripts, as well as a few other little tricks.
Investigating the Cause of SQL Server High CPU Load Conditions When They Happen
Any DBA who is trying to find the cause of an intermittent problem with a server or database dreams of being able to use a query or procedure take a snap of the relevant variables at the point when the problem occurred. Laerte takes an example of a slow-running query hogging resources to show that you can run queries when a WMI alert is fired, and save the results for later inspection, whenever it happens.
Searching and finding a string value in all columns in a SQL Server table
Sometimes there is a need to find if a string value exists in any column in your table. Although there are system stored procedures that do a "for each database" or a "for each table", there is not a system stored procedure that does a "for each column".
Avoiding the Hell of having to Remember DDL syntax
What's your favorite productivity tool when writing SQL? Phil Factor has has flirted with most of them, from templates and snippets to a programmer's clipboard and back again.
The Instance ID MSSQLSERVER Is Already In Use
This article will explain how to fix "The Instance ID 'MSSQLSERVER' Is Already In Use By SQL Server Instance 'MSSQLSERVER.INACTIVE'
Error.
How to Drop All Your Indexes – Fast
You probably shouldn't be doing this, but if you need to, Brent Ozar has a script for that.
A Pattern for Email Address storage and retrieval
Email addresses are very prevalent in IT systems and often used as a natural primary key. The repetitive storage of email addresses in multiple tables is a bad design choice. Following is a design pattern to store email addresses in a single table and to retrieve them efficiently.
Blogs
Car Update September 2026
By Steve Jones
Software is hard. While I love our Lucid Gravity, I realize that they are...
Microsoft Tools for Making Data AI-Ready
By James Serra
Making Data AI-Ready, Part 2 (This is the second article in a three-part series...
Local Models Using GPUs with Ollama
By Steve Jones
Can you use your GPUs when running a local model under Ollama? You can,...
Forums
Absolute and Relative References
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Moving Beyond the Reboot: Finding the Culprit Behind Memory Pressure
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Reserved Words I
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