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 …
How to Access and Use Azure Key Vault Secrets in an Azure Devops Pipeline
When you run a CI/CD pipeline, you often need confidential values like passwords, authentication tokens, service principal secrets etc. when you want to deploy a certain artefact. You don’t want to store those secrets directly in your pipelines as this …
How to Use the psql Command-Line Tool with Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server
A number of client tools are available for working with Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server. With these tools, you can connect to your ADP instance, manage the environment, and define your database structures. You can also query, update and d …
Connect Cloud Power BI to on prem SQL Server
Power BI has the versatility that you can publish your reports to the cloud (Power BI Service) and grant your organization’s individuals with access to view them anywhere and from any device. If there’s changing data then you need a way to refresh it a …
Model Context Protocol (MCP): A Developer’s Guide to Long-Context LLM Integration
Large Language Models (LLMs) like Anthropic’s Claude have unlocked massive context windows (up to 100k tokens in Claude 2) that let them consider entire documents or codebases in a single go. However, effectively providing relevant context to these mod …
How to safely and surgically restore filegroups
In all my years working with SQL Server and navigating disaster recovery scenarios, I’ve come across surprisingly few practical and comprehensive guides on filegroup-level restoration. While many resources cover full and differential backups well enoug …
[Video] Office Hours: Interview Horror Stories Edition
Wanna hear about my worst job interviews? I drove up to 8,000 feet where it’s 30 degrees colder than Las Vegas to bring you these answers to your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. The audio’s a little odd on here because it was …
MongoDB and Python in action
Overview As a part of this article, we will learn basics of connecting to MongoDB using a python stand-alone script to make sure that we can push data into our locally setup MongoDB. We will focus on the following areas: Downloading and installing Mong …
Best Way to Repair SQL Database: How to Restore SQL Server?
Summary: SQL Server administrators frequently encounter the critical challenge of unexpected MDF file corruption. Such corruption can result in prolonged downtime and, in severe cases, permanent data loss, disrupting operations significantly. If you ar …
Poll Results: Yes, Your DBAs Can Read the Data.
Last week, I asked if your database administrators could read all of the data in all databases. The results (which may be different from this post, because I’m writing the post ahead of time and the poll is still open): Yes: 61% Yes, but we trust them …
MySQL Index Overviews: PRIMARY KEY Indexes
If you’re a developer who had interactions with indexes in the past, you certainly know that indexes in MySQL come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Readers of this blog will certainly not be alien to the nuances of indexes within MySQL – this blog has …
The Query Tuning Trick You Should Use More: Pagination
When I’m tuning queries, the normal answer is to make the query perform better – either via changing the T-SQL, adding hints, or adding indexes so that the data’s better prepared for the query. However, sometimes when I’m looking at the output of sp_Bl …