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 …
[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything At Home
I’m back in the home office to take another round of the top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:52 chris: After your time at SQLBits you’d posted about the number of SQL Server consultants who w …
Looking Back On My 2018 Predictions
For T-SQL Tuesday #100, Adam Machanic’s challenge for SQL bloggers was to predict what databases would be like 100 months from then. Me in 2018 at the Porsche museum in Germany Well, guess what: that’s coming up this July! I wonder how many of the orig …
Why migrating from Oracle is harder than anyone admits – and what you should do instead
Oracle-to-Postgres migration seems simple at first, but everything changes when you hit the DBMS_* packages. The 200,000 lines of procedural logic your application has built on Oracle’s built-in package ecosystem — job scheduling, optimizer statistics, …
Who’s Hiring Database People? June 2026 Edition
Is your company hiring for a database position as of June 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 title, …
Never ship a broken semantic model again: how to build automated tests in Power BI with user-defined functions
User-defined functions (UDFs) in Power BI let you build reusable, automated tests for your semantic models — so you catch broken measures, duplicate rows, and faulty relationships before they reach your reports. This article walks through how to use UD …
How to host an AI text embeddings model for SQL Server using Ollama
When we want to use AI-based comparisons of text, via vector search in SQL Server, we need to first generate embeddings for the text. An embedding is a numeric representation of meaning, usually represented by vectors. In this article, I’ll show you ho …