Choosing Your Tasks
Today Steve Jones asks about your job and if you get to pick the things you work on or is most of your time assigned to tasks by someone else?
Data Mining Part 32:The Microsoft Data Mining Enemies
In this chapter, we will talk about the competition of Data Mining
Data Mining Part 32:The Microsoft Data Mining Enemies
In this chapter, we will talk about the competition of Data Mining
SQL and R
There is plenty that is novel and perhaps foreign to a new R user, but it's no reason to abandon your hard-earned SQL skills! In this article, Casimir Saternos explains that not only can you easily retrieve data from SQL Sources for analysis and visualisation in R, but you can also use SQL to create, clean, filter, query and otherwise manipulate datasets within R, using a wide choice of relational databases.
Follow-Up on Cursor Options
In this follow-up to a previous article, Aaron Bertrand reiterates that – while you should never just accept the defaults – you really should think about which options are most applicable to your scenario.
Shorten Audits, Tighten Security with Minion Enterprise
Minion Enterprise can help you with security management in an enterprise.
Automatic UNDO in Oracle
Automatic UNDO Management isn't voodoo or black magic, although it can seem that way when it isn't clearly understood. How does Oracle decide how many UNDO segments to create at startup, and what is the underlying goal of the process? David Fitzjarrell investigates.
What Can You Do?
Security alerts and concerns are serious, but that doesn't mean that everyone will treat them that way.
Write Cleaner T-SQL Using Version Control
If we only use version control as a way to back up our code then it is pure overhead but actually there are real benefits. We can use source control to write better, cleaner, more readable code.
Blogs
Narrow Task Decomposition in AI Pipeline Agents
A nightly load into sales_fact fails. Ask an orchestrating agent to break down the...
Car Update: August 2026
By Steve Jones
It’s been some time since I provided a car update, so I decided to...
Microsoft Fabric OneLake Shortcuts: When to Use Them and When Not To
By James Serra
An architecture scenario Imagine separate Sales, Finance, Shared Data, and Executive Analytics workspaces. Sales...
Forums
Managing Incidents and Fighting Fires
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Backing Up a DMK
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The Quiet Part
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Question of the Day
Backing Up a DMK
In SQL Server 2025, I have a database with a Database Masker Key (DMK). I want to back up this key and keep a copy offline. When do I have to open this key before running the backup?
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