[Video] Office Hours: Stoicism in the Home Office
I’m back in the home office this week, covering your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento, and we finish up the session with a discussion of the stoic habit I use to start my mornings. Here’s what we discussed: 00:00 Start 01:42 Spi …
Learning PostgreSQL with Grant: Preparing for the PostgreSQL certification
I want to be up front and honest: I suspect I’ll fail this. However, I’m going to try. I’m registered for it, so no backing out now. In this article, I’ll run through everything I’m doing to prepare…for the exam. That’s right – exam. And a PostgreSQL o …
Who’s Hiring Database People? September 2026 Edition
Is your company hiring for a database position as of September 2026? Do you wanna work with the kinds of people who read this blog? Let’s make a love connection. If your company is hiring, leave a comment. The rules: Your comment must include the job t …
SQL Server login failures: how to monitor, report, and alert on them (complete guide)
Failed logins are one of the clearest early-warning signs of trouble on a SQL Server – whether that’s a misconfigured connection string, an expired password, or an actual unauthorized access attempt. Yet, by default, SQL Server won’t proactively tell y …
Free Webcast: You Shouldn’t Use SQL Agent for Batch Processes.
SQL Server Agent is a solid scheduler for database administration and simple, database-local automation. In a small to midsize shop, it is the right tool for backing up databases, checking for corruption, and maintaining statistics. But as a shop grows …
Is AI already learning from our old, poor-quality code?
In this Simple Talk opinion piece, Greg Low unpacks how AI models actually filter and weigh training data, why the most common answer isn’t always the best one, and why truth itself can depend on timing and context — not just quality. A while back, I w …
Why SQL Server’s default trigger execution model is a security flaw – and what Microsoft should do about it
In my previous article, I described a privilege escalation scenario involving Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server and a database-level DDL trigger created by a database-scoped principal. This database-level DDL trigger was later fired by a highly-privileged A …
What is cloud database vendor lock-in? The 3 types explained (and how to audit yours)
Cloud database vendor lock-in is one of the most expensive surprises in enterprise infrastructure — not because the dependency is hidden, but because most teams never quantify it before committing to a platform. Each distinct type – engine lock-in, fea …
How to Download the Stack Overflow Database for Postgres
You wanna learn PostgreSQL, and you wanna use a sample database with big real-world data, the same kinds of issues that pop up with real-life data distribution skew, and fun query challenges. StackOverflow.com provides a free data dump in XML format wi …
What your AI strategy is missing (according to the people who know your data best)
AI is everywhere, and the pressure to adopt it is relentless. But what does responsible, practical AI adoption actually look like for database and software professionals – the people who live closest to the data? Redgate brought together three experts …
It’s Been 10 Years. Has Microsoft Built What You Voted For?
Ten years ago, I published a blog post with the top 10 most highly upvoted requests for Microsoft SQL Server as shown on their feedback site at the time, Connect.Microsoft.com. That site has gone out to a nice farm upstate, but let’s revisit that top 1 …
9 things I wish SQL Server had (and why they’d matter)
Anyone who’s spent years writing T-SQL has a mental list of “why doesn’t SQL Server just do this already?” moments. Here are 9 of those from Louis Davidson’s perspective – a wish list of practical, coding-oriented feature requests drawn from real-world …
How Azure Arc allows a DB admin to become SQL Server sysadmin – the vulnerability explained
Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server is designed to bring on-premises and multi-cloud SQL Server instances under centralized Azure management, but a newly documented privilege escalation technique shows how that same management workflow can be turned against t …
sp_TexasHoldEm: Multi-Player Poker in T-SQL
Wanna play some Texas Hold ‘Em style poker and make a pile of Query Bucks? Wanna watch other database people playing? Fire up SSMS and connect to: Server: firstresponderkit.database.windows.net Database: StackOverflow2010 Username: LadyGaga Password: p …
Database Animations: The Difference Between Row Compression and Page Compression
What’s the difference between SQL Server’s row compression and page compression, and when does each one make sense? Row compression turns every fixed-length datatype into a variable-length datatype, using as little space as possible to store it Page co …