Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for July 2025: Independence Release
I’mma wax philosophical for a second: I love the open source nature of the First Responder Kit because it lets anybody, anywhere, diagnose database problems faster. If you’re a full time employee somewhere today, you owe it to yourself to use the FRK s …
SQL Server 2022 Clusterless Distributed Availability Group
One customer had a very specific scenario: They had an Always On Availability Group with Windows Server Failover Cluster Each node had its own storage, so the witness was not disk-based but network-based One node was in the cloud and the other was a ph …
Revolutionizing Efficiency: The Power of Custom Automation Software Development
With the ever-increasing pace of the digital era, companies are continuously looking for opportunities to enhance efficiency, cut costs, and optimize operations. The most viable way to accomplish these is through Custom Automation Software Development. …
SQL Server and AI: Integrating Machine Learning Services
Have you ever wished you could run your data science experiments right where your data lives, without the hassle of moving huge files around? That’s exactly what Microsoft set out to solve with SQL Server Machine Learning Services (MLS). Starting with …
[Video] Office Hours: Finally Back in the Home Office
I’m finally back in the home office after running around Europe for a month. Let’s talk through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 01:52 World Peace: Hey Brent, I am working in AZURE curre …
PostgreSQL Aggregate Functions
Overview In this article we will go through the various in built aggregate functions available in PostgreSQL. Aggregate functions perform a calculation on a set of rows and return a single value. COUNT Function The COUNT function is a simple and very u …
Zero-Trust Architecture for Cloud-Based AI Systems
The post Zero-Trust Architecture for Cloud-Based AI Systems appeared first on SQLServerCentral.
Cloning Master Admin User Permissions in Amazon RDS for SQL Server with Fine-Grained Control
Introduction When you create a new Amazon RDS for SQL Server instance, the master user is provisioned with elevated privileges, allowing them to perform most administrative operations permitted within the confines of the RDS managed environment. Howeve …
Creating Uber-Fast Maps With 23ai Vector Tiles and H3 Indexes: Part 1
Oracle Database 23ai added 300+ new features like the new VECTOR datatype that get most of the attention, but often overlooked are two new features that dramatically expand support for complex geospatial problem-solving. In this article we’ll take a cl …
Microsoft Introduced AI Integrations for SQL Server.
You know how you put “https://” at the beginning of web site addresses, and your browser can magically talk to all kinds of web servers, all over the world? Well, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standard for AI stuff to talk to other things. It’s …
Common SQL Server Problems: Network Related or Instance Specific Error Occurred
This is the first in a series of articles meant to provide practical solutions to common issues. In this post, we’ll talk about one of the most pervasive error messages out there: A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing …
Unmasking CXPACKET and CXCONSUMER in SQL Server: What Your Execution Plan Isn’t Telling You
Introduction When you see high CPU and the query plan says « parallelism, » one of the first suspects is CXPACKET. Since SQL Server 2016 SP2, Microsoft split this into two wait types: cxconsumer and cxpacket. These are critical for understanding whethe …
Automating SQL Server Inventory Collection with SQLInventory
Managing SQL Server inventory is crucial when your organization has many SQL Server Instances. A central database that stores details like SQL Version counts, Operating System details , SQL Configurations, SQL License counts and other important metadat …
[Video] Job Options: Zooming Out to See the Big Picture
One of my readers asked me to give a 30-minute talk to their company’s internal employees discussing the job market at large. The target audience was technical people of all disciplines – not just database administrators, but all kinds of people who wo …
13 Things I wish I knew about Power Query (when I first started)
When I first started with Power Query, it was in Excel, through the Power Pivot feature. I was amazed at how I could transform data with just a few clicks and quickly create PivotTables. Then, when Power Query appeared in Power BI, I began working with …