A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Louis Davidson has made a big mistake:
As I sit here, preparing to write my roundup post, I have not read anyone else’s post yet. I thought it would be good to introduce the idea first, recap to the other posts, then mine. I won’t share any detail of the mistake I shared, but I do want to mention something I included in my post. Types of mistakes. Mistakes of choice, and mistakes of accidents.
Read on for a nice round-up of a popular topic.
Leave a CommentPaul Turley thinks about how we think:
You can be the greatest report designer on the planet, but if your report doesn’t meet the needs of the report consumer, it’s all for nothing. In this section, I break down the most important considerations for identifying your audience and their information needs. These are all factors to consider before you jump in and start designing your report.
Paul hits on quite a few of the foundational concepts around how humans visual stimuli and tells some interesting stories along the way.
Leave a CommentJohn Deardurff shares some advice:
After 25 years as a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT), one thing I have learned is that teaching technical content requires more than just subject‑matter expertise. Great technical instructors create an environment where learners feel comfortable, engaged, and motivated to explore complex concepts at their own pace.
Click through for ten such tips. I tend to follow seven of them pretty well, though the three around questions are where I’m weakest.
Leave a CommentOver the years, I’ve taken a lot of Microsoft exams. I’ve also spent a lot of time writing exams for Microsoft exam providers. And while I’ve been doing that, I’ve spent a lot of time in forums where I’ve been checking out what people say about the exams.
What amazes me is the number of misconceptions that people have about these exams. So, I thought it would be helpful to write about the most common ones. Unlike what I see (but shouldn’t see) in the forums, I can’t discuss specific questions, but the majority of this is unrelated to the actual questions or the specific exams.
Read on to learn more. One thing Greg touches on en passant is quickly-updating information. This is one of the trickiest parts of Microsoft exams, especially in certain fields like AI: sometimes you’ll find a question that was written two versions of a product ago (i.e., 6 months ago) and now you have to guess whether you give the answer that is correct today or the answer that was correct then. I know they try to keep these exams up to date, but it’s hard to do against a moving target.
Leave a CommentJohn Deardurff installs SQL Server 2025:
Microsoft SQL Server 2025 introduces major advancements in performance, security, and built‑in AI capabilities. Before you can start exploring its new features, you need to install it correctly. This guide walks you through the full installation process of SQL Server 2025, SQL Server Management Studio 22, and restoring the AdventureWorks2025 database to create a practice environment to test the new features and enhancements of this new release.
I was going to joke, “But John, what about your loyal Linux-using readers? How can we do this?” But instead, I’ll say that I’m glad that AdventureWorks is still alive and kicking. It is, on the whole, a nice demo database.
Comments closedLouis Davidson has wrapped up a series of videos:
Today I finished up my first 24 videos in my Blogging for Programmers series of posts. I started out calling it vlogmas, but Tipmas definitely fits a lot better.
You can access the blogs about them here or go directly to the Youtube playlist here.
It was a lot of fun to do this series, and more will be coming in the new year at a much slower pace. I hope you enjoyed the series and/or learned something. The blogs each have a succinct version of the list of tips, so if you don’t have 5 – 10 minutes to watch a video, the main points are listed there.
If you’re interested in blogging, Louis has a lot of great tips across the 24 videos.
Comments closedMike Robbins shares some guidance:
Passive voice hides the actor, making instructions vague or more difficult to follow. Instead, use active voice to clarify who performs the action. Active voice includes any sentence where the subject performs the action (e.g., You run the script).
- Incorrect: When the font size is adjusted, the code becomes easier to read.
- Correct: If you adjust the font size, your code becomes easier to read.
Active voice makes instructions direct and actionable.
I hate passive voice enough that I would link to this post even if it were the only piece of advice on there. There are very specific good uses for passive voice in English, particularly when you do not know who the actor was and the actor does not matter. The rest of the time, people primarily use passive voice when they want to weasel out of something or avoid assigning blame. And most of the time, even when you think this you have a good use case for passive voice, you probably don’t.
Case in point: “Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was a primary inciting factor for the Great War.” This is passive voice—we swapped a verb (assassinate) to a noun (assassination) in order to focus on the direct object at the expense of the subject. The general rule of thumb is that if you can ask “By whom?” when reading a sentence, there is a very good chance that the author used passive voice. And we may think at first that the actor does not matter, but I chose this example precisely because he does. In order to understand why the Austro-Hungarian government reacted the way it did, you have to know that the assassin was a Serbian nationalist, that the Russian government had a particularly close connection with Serbia, and that the Austro-Hungarian government had a very contentious relationship with the Balkans at that point (and I’m being kind by using the word “contentious” here). Granted, it’s not critical to fit all of this into the one sentence, but removing the subject turns into a game of “hide the ball” way too quickly.
In active tense, I’d rewrite the sentence to be something like: “A primary inciting factor for the Great War occurred when a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand.”
Comments closedChad Baldwin shares a warning:
Well, a few days ago, I ran into the result of one of those awkward pieces when combining the MSSQL extension for VS Code, MSSQL MCP Server and Copilot.
The short of it is…I asked Copilot to change the connection used by the MSSQL extension to use a particular database. I later asked Copilot to describe a table in the database (which uses the MSSQL MCP server), only for it to claim the table didn’t exist. I realized right away it was due to competing connections between the MSSQL extension and the MSSQL MCP Server configuration. It was also at that moment where I realized this situation could potentially be SO MUCH worse than simply not finding a table…
So let’s set up a worst case scenario and see what happens.
This is basically the equivalent of “Wait, that SSMS window was production? Uh-oh.” Not that this has ever happened to me, of course. Or any of you. Nope.
Comments closedKevin Hill broaches a challenging topic:
Your systems, your data, your customer experience – they all rely on that “invisible” database engine humming along behind the scenes. And if you’re responsible for keeping it running, you need the budget to do it right.
Here’s how to make your case without getting buried in tech jargon or glazed-over stares.
Dave Wentzel has a very solid response to this in the comments. My point of emphasis is working in business terms. Think in terms of return on investment, especially if you can calculate it. That’s a real challenge for technical people because we think in terms of capabilities and don’t have much information on the practical effects of whatever it is we do all day, but figure out what your company uses for cost analysis and try to work in those terms.
Comments closedHaripriya Naidu explains the difference:
There is a difference between the terms Concurrency and Parallelism. For people like me who know just enough English to survive, meaning of these 2 terms might sound similar. But in SQL Server world, they mean different things.
Click through to understand the difference between the two.
Comments closed