Spackle: Making sure you can connect to the DAC
The DAC is an important tool and several things can go wrong when trying to connect to it.
A TDD Journey: 1-Trials and Tribulations
Test-Driven Development (TDD) has a misleading name, because the objective is to design and specify that the system you are developing behaves in the ways that the customer expects, and to prove that it does so for the lifetime of the system. Michael Sorens starts an introduction to TDD that is more of a journey in six parts.
Data Driven Security
Set a security standard across environments that developers can see and run, but not change.
SQL Server Alert for Tempdb Growing Out of Control
One option to get notified when TempDB grows is to create a SQL Alert to fire a SQL Agent Job that will automatically send an email alerting the DBA when the Tempdb reaches a specific file size. This tip explains how to set it up.
New SQL Server 2014 Permissions: CONNECT ANY DATABASE
CONNECT ANY DATABASE is one of three new permissions in SQL Server 2014 that can be granted to server logins. What is this new permission good for and why would we ever want this?
Avoiding Database Deployment Disasters – 7 Tips
Here are seven practical tips for any 'accidental DBA' or developer, faced with having to deploy an upgrade to a database live to production, in a development environment that is in the early stages of getting the database code “house in order".
Frustration with Bad Design
It can be frustrating to deal with poorly implemented systems, but Steve Jones notes that you can't take things into your own hands.
Frustration with Bad Design
It can be very easy for technology experts to get frustrated when they see bad design and practices, but you must be careful with how you go about trying to influence change.
How to Handle Calculations Related to fiscal year and quarter
This article describes an easy way to handle calculation based on fiscal year and quarter
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
Searching for my own posts
I have a really stupid question... Is there an easy way to search for...
How to Work with On-Premises AI Models to Generate T-SQL Code
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Work with On-Premises...
Escaping Strings
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Escaping Strings
Question of the Day
Escaping Strings
The STRING_ESCAPE() function requires 2 parameters in SQL Server 2025. The first is a string of text and the second is the type of escape rules being used. What are the options for the second parameter?
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