Hiring for Culture
Steve Jones discusses the decision to hire someone that fits in with your culture at work, and what that means.
Stairway to SQL Server Security Level 10: Row-Level Security
Unlike some other industrial-strength database servers, SQL Server lacks a built-in mechanism for protecting individual data records, called row-level security. This stairway level explores why you might want to use such a low-level granularity of data access security and how you can implement row-level security.
Demystifying Oracle's Clustering Factor
One of the more confusing statistics in Oracle is one called the clustering factor. Associated with an index, it's actually dependent on the table data, more specifically the distance between 'jumps' for a given index key. Commonly, a 'jump' is the number of blocks between rows containing the given index key starting with the first block found containing that key. If that sounds confusing don't despair, David Fitzjarrell explains in detail.
Visualizing in Space
An amazing visualization of basketball players has Steve Jones encouraging you to find your own pet project and showcase some skills.
The Importance of Maintenance on MSDB
MSDB is a system database used by SQL Server. MSDB stores all sorts of data, such as backup history, log shipping monitor history, SSIS packages and Service Broker queue data to name a few. Just like user databases, MSDB needs regular maintenance, including index optimizations and, more importantly, regular purging. In this article, Tim Radney looks at how neglecting your MSDB can negatively impact on your environment.
Learning Backup to Azure
References and links to get you started in backing up your database to the Azure blob storage.
No Downtime Deployments
Can you deploy your database changes without any downtime? Steve Jones has a few notes.
What We Want and What We'll Pay For
The challenges of getting enough resources for our projects aren't always apparent.
Can Code Review Be Automated?
Code must be checked, but how? Phil Factor shares his thoughts on automating SQL code reviews.
Is Skynet Coming?
The poll this week looks to the future and artificial intelligence. Steve Jones wonders if we'll ever really see this.
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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