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 …
JSON indexing in SQL Server 2025: how it works and current limitations
SQL Server 2025 finally gives developers a native JSON data type and, with it, a purpose-built way to index JSON documents with the new CREATE JSON INDEX statement. Before this, indexing JSON meant exposing individual properties through computed column …
How to implement Deep Data Security (DeepSec) in Oracle 26ai: complete step-by-step guide (part one)
So you’ve been tasked with deploying a Generative AI, RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), or Agentic AI application. Have you thought about how to secure your most sensitive structured data – as well as your vectorized unstructured data? The good new …
How to avoid nested REPLACE functions with TRANSLATE in SQL Server
If your T-SQL is buried under layers of nested REPLACE() calls just to swap out a few characters, there’s a simpler way. SQL Server’s TRANSLATE() function — introduced in 2017 but still rarely used — lets you replace multiple characters in a single str …
Testing AI with an Office Hours Question
When the new MiniMax H3 image-to-video model dropped this month, I was really impressed with how quickly and easily it was able to make 5-10 second videos from a starting image – not in the cloud, mind you, but on my own home computer gear: View this p …
How to use the Power BI Desktop Bridge to automate tasks in Power BI Desktop and GitHub Copilot
Microsoft continues to blur the line between low-code visual tools and code-first development for Power BI, recently launching a set of official Fabric AI Skills and the Power BI Desktop Bridge preview feature. Together, they allow AI agents to install …
When CTEs Don’t Work, Try Temp Tables – #TSQL2sday
Common Table Expressions are awesome because they let SQL Server reorder processing in whatever way it deems to be the most efficient for your current data distribution, on your current version of SQL Server. Default to CTEs. When SQL Server gets that …
The full story of PASS Data Community Summit: 25 years of connect, share, and learn
PASS Data Community Summit is celebrating a milestone most communities never reach: 25+ years of data professionals showing up for each other. From a single Microsoft-seeded user group in 1999, to the global, multi-platform conferences everyone knows t …
MSDB attack paths: how to secure SQL Server Agent, triggers, and restores
SQL Server DBAs routinely rely on automation: SQL Server Agent jobs, maintenance plans, refresh processes, restore scripts, replication cleanup, CDC operations, cross-database modules, and temporary objects. These workflows are often trusted because th …