[Video] Office Hours in a Lava Field
On a 12-hour layover in Keflavik, I pulled over my Suzuki Jimny (love these little things, and we can’t buy them in the US) in some of the freshest real estate in the world and took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. This is …
Why you should still become SQL-certified in 2026 (and how to achieve it)
It may seem that in today’s rapidly evolving landscape of AI and digital threats, becoming certified is a thing of the past. A throwback, perhaps, to forums circa 2015, where seeing ‘SQL-certified’ community members was the norm. However, many people a …
I’m Coming to the #PassDataSummit in Seattle!
The lineup for the PASS Data Community Summit Seattle event was just released,and I’m proud to share that I’ll be teaching my new all-day pre-conference workshop. Dev-Prod Demon Hunters: Finding the Real Cause of Production Slowness Production is slow. …
Vector search in SQL Server: VECTOR_DISTANCE, VECTOR_SEARCH, and index trade-offs
In this article, I’ll explain how to implement vector search in SQL Server using the VECTOR_DISTANCE and VECTOR_SEARCH functions. You’ll learn how vector indexes work, when to use them, and what the key trade-offs are — including the current read-only …
We’re Discontinuing SQL ConstantCare and the Consultant Toolkit. Here’s Why.
About ten years ago, I sketched out an idea for a different kind of SQL Server monitoring tool: one that gathered data just once per day, and gave you a short email with a specific list of actionable tasks to make a difference in health and performance …
How to anonymize PII in LLM pipelines (5 key techniques explained)
Large language models (LLMs) and the agents built on top of them ingest everything they are given, including personally-identifiable information (PII). In workflows where PII is inevitable, proper measures should exist for data sanitization. Data can l …
From anthropology to analytics: how to build a data career with no prior experience (10 tips from a Microsoft MVP)
Kristyna Ferris didn’t come from a traditional tech background. She studied anthropology, stumbled into data through an admin job, taught herself Power BI on her lunch breaks, and eventually built a career that spans Microsoft Fabric, PySpark, Python, …
[Video] Office Hours: Off St. Thomas
I’m at sea again, this time cruising aboard the Disney Treasure off of St. Thomas. Let’s go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. 00:00 Start 01:40 DbaMan: You have been reulctant to turn on ADR. It is required for opti …
It’s 2026. Why are databases still failing GDPR compliance audits?
Seven years after GDPR came into force, European regulators have issued over 2,245 fines totalling nearly 5.65 billion euros — and enforcement shows no sign of slowing down. Yet most compliance conversations focus on legal and governance failures, whil …
And Then There Was The Time RCSI Actually Made Query Results More Accurate.
Normally when I tell people about SQL Server’s optimistic concurrency isolation levels, Read Committed Snapshot Isolation (RCSI) and Snapshot Isolation (SI), I have to give them a little speech about how they need to test their queries because the resu …
Why even the best teams struggle with cloud migrations
According to Redgate’s 2026 State of the Database Landscape report, 91% of teams – no matter how experienced – still hit at least one significant challenge during their move to the cloud. The culprit usually isn’t poor execution, but the things no one …
If You Had to Go Back On-Prem… #tsql2sday
For T-SQL Tuesday #199, Koen Verbeeck posed an excellent question: if your company moved up to the cloud, but after migrating, had to come back on-premises, what would be the big problems? I’ve had clients in this exact situation! Here are some of my f …
Today Is the Last Day of Our Anniversary Sale!
Way back in May 2002, I posted my first blog post here. I didn’t know what it would eventually become, but I just wanted to stake out a place online where I could write stuff, put it into a database, and have that database serve my stuff out to other p …
How to call an Ollama-based AI text embeddings model from SQL Server 2025
In the first article of this series, I explained how to install and configure Ollama to host text embeddings models locally. I also demonstrated how to install Caddy as a proxy to allow SQL Server to use Ollama via https-based calls. In this article, I …
How to stop AI hallucinations in enterprise RAG systems (a complete guide)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) does not solve AI hallucinations. Instead, it just moves the failure point from the language model to the retrieval pipeline — where poor chunking, weak embeddings, outdated documents, and low-confidence search resu …