AI is Like Outsourcing. #TSQL2sday
When you ask data people how they feel about AI, you get pretty rabid, extreme reactions. People either love it or hate it. Set that aside for a second, and let’s zoom out and think about a bigger picture question. What’s it like to work with someone y …
Power BI TMDL View: Benefits, Security Risks & Best Practices
The Tabular Model Definition Language (TMDL) provides a simpler way of defining Power BI Semantic Models. Unlike the JSON-based Tabular Model Scripting Language (TMSL), TMDL uses a more accessible tab-based format for specifying DAX measures, relations …
How to create your custom GPT SQL Expert
Introduction ChatGPT includes custom GPTs. You can create your own custom GPT. In this article, we will demonstrate how to create a custom GPT expert in SQL Server. Requirements To create your own GPT, you need to use the paid version of ChatGPT. First …
MongoDB and NodeJS in action
Overview MongoDB is a popular NoSQL database used for building modern, scalable applications. In this article, we’ll cover how to set up MongoDB on Windows and connect to it using Node.js. We will also perform some basic Create, Read, Update, and Delet …
MySQL Shell Basic Configuration Management (Part 5a – Optimizing MySQL Performance)
Welcome back to our comprehensive guide on optimizing MySQL performance using MySQL Shell. So far in this series, we introduced you to MySQL Shell, focusing on its features and how it can be used to configure basic MySQL settings, before we dived into …
[Video] Office Hours: 15 Answers in 30 Minutes
The first few questions from this week’s crop at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are very much about what-problem-are-you-trying-to-solve, but they get more complex from there. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 02:49 My Erik is Strong: Do you suggest …
Working with Indexes on SSMS
Overview: In SQL Server, indexing is a technique used to improve the performance of queries by reducing the amount of data that SQL Server needs to scan. You can think of it like a table of contents in a book—it helps SQL Server find data more quickly. …
SQL Server Threats
Microsoft SQL Server is a robust relational database management system. It stores and processes sensitive data for countless applications, which also makes it a high-value target for cybercriminals. Below are some security threats that SQL Server envir …
Deprecated but Forgotten: Why SQL Server’s Text, NText, and Image Data Types Still Haunt Your Systems
Introduction These data types – TEXT, NTEXT, and IMAGE – have been part of SQL Server since its earliest versions, designed to store large objects like documents, HTML, and binary data when there was no better alternative. However, starting from SQL Se …
Why CQRS and Event Sourcing Are Gaining Ground in High-Concurrency Web Systems
In web app development company boardrooms, architects and engineers are debating old assumptions. Scaling up isn’t just about faster servers or better caching anymore. It’s about reshaping how systems think. CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregati …
How to Make Leading Wildcard Searches Fast
99.9% of you are never gonna need this. But let’s say you need to run queries with leading (not trailing) wildcards, like this search for all the different national versions of the Encabulator, each of which has different prefixes depending on which go …
Who’s Hiring in the Microsoft Database Community? August 2025 Edition
Is your company hiring for a database position as of August 2025? 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 titl …
Mastering SQL VIEWs: Syntax, Use Cases, and Best Practices
VIEWs are an undervalued and underused feature in SQL. They basically consist of a query that has been given a name, and a parameter list, so can be used like an inline macro. Technically, you’re supposed to think of it as a virtual table. The idea of …
Yet another Date Dimension
Evolution of code The thing with any bit of code that has been around for a while, is that when change comes along, the tendency is to cater for the change by adding new stuff, while nothing gets taken away. Some stuff has definitely been taken away …
Advanced SQL Server Page Forensics: Detecting Page Splits and Allocations with DBCC PAGE
Introduction Page splits are one of those silent performance killers in SQL Server that many DBAs have heard about but rarely analyze in depth. On the surface, inserts might look harmless – rows keep getting added, queries return results, and no errors …