Posts

Reorganizations and layoffs are now commonplace in the tech industry: a daily occurrence. It’s increasingly necessary for tech workers mentally prepare for potential job loss and uncertainties that arise. It’s a common antipattern to believe that it’s “too late” to prepare for a layoff or unexpected reorganization if a layoff has already occurred in your organization.

It’s never too late, and it’s always the right time these days to start mentally preparing yourself for change– because there’s reliably another change around the corner.

One thing I enjoy about AI chatbots is that they can help me recognize when I’ve missed something obvious.

There’s a lot of hype, concern, and fear regarding generative AI lately. Tools like ChatGPT are so good at generating groups of words that it feels like magic– however, generative AI doesn’t have the ability to understand or verify the language it generates. For example, it’s been used to write news stories for CNET – but sometimes included facts that are just plain wrong.

One positive use case of a generative AI tool like ChatGPT is to ask it to make a case for different perspectives than your own, and use this as a starting point to broaden your understanding – with the knowledge that we need to verify everything ChatGPT tells us. As an example, let’s chat to ChatGPT about Object Relational Mapping tools (ORMs).

Hosted cloud databases make a lot of administrative tasks easier, or take care of them for you altogether.

But here are three things that I’ve found a little too easy to forget about Azure SQL Database.

We’ve just published a new article in the SQL docs, Tune nonclustered indexes with missing index suggestions . The article explains what the missing index feature is, limitations of the feature, and how to use missing index DMVs and missing index suggestions in Query Store to tune indexes.

During a discussion of troubleshooting query timeouts in Azure SQL Database recently, I thought – hey, I wonder if you can find queries that timed out in Query Store?

Turns out, you can.

We’ve recently updated the SQL Server and Azure SQL index architecture and design guide. This article is an in-depth guide to indexing in databases using the SQL Server engine, including SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure Synapse Analytics.

Our recent update adds a table to categorize the types of indexes discussed in the article, clarifies B-trees vs B+ trees, and describes how row locators (aka “secret columns”) are used in nonclustered indexes.

We now explicitly define ‘requests’ and ‘workers’ in the Azure SQL Database documentation, and we’ve cleaned up multiple places where we used to equate the two terms. In this post, I share the history of the two terms when it comes to Azure SQL Database, why the two were ever equated, and why things like this are tricky to change.

Writing helps me learn. In my job as a Content Developer, this is more true than ever: there’s a fantastic group of folks, both in the Database Docs team and in the Microsoft Data Platform engineering team, who review and contribute to content.

I’ve just had the pleasure of publishing my first new article in the Microsoft Docs, Diagnose and troubleshoot high CPU on Azure SQL Database.

I’d like to openly and honestly answer the rumors that I have been removed from the Microsoft MVP program.

Have you ever tried to create an object in SQL Server, but it failed due to a missing table, column, or other dependency? If so, you’ve hit a case where SQL Server doesn’t offer ‘deferred name resolution’.

Have you been meaning to learn about SQL Server in the Azure cloud, but never seem to get around to it? It’s easy to be overwhelmed and not know where to begin.

I recommend you start with the Azure SQL Fundamentals Learning Path.

I stepped through this training this week and WOW, this is an incredibly high quality free course, complete with hands-on exercises in an online sandbox. I wish I’d done this sooner!

Today I walked through the Use Azure Data Studio to connect and query Azure SQL database Quickstart. This Quickstart is solid and is great for someone new to Azure Data Studio.

At the end of the Quickstart it suggested I try the Tutorial: Use the Transact-SQL editor to create database objects - Azure Data Studio. The tutorial taught me a couple of things that I’ve not noticed about Azure Data Studio, even though I’ve used it for a couple of years.

I’m working through a series of tutorials and learning paths for Azure SQL and sharing bite-sized reviews.

In this first walkthrough, I’m stepping through the Create a Single Database tutorial.

This post is part of TSQLTuesday #140, “What have you been up to with containers?"

Disposable databases are indispensable for software developers, both for initial development work and in automation pipelines. Containers pair exceptionally well with temporary databases and provide a lightweight mechanism to spin up an environment on demand.

When I woke up today in the UK, Twitter was alive with jokes, hot takes, and sympathy about an email sent out to millions of folks on a contact list for HBO Max featuring the subject line, “Integration Test Email #1”.

One big gotcha that teams often encounter when automating deployments for databases is that it’s difficult– or sometimes impossible – to ensure that all changes to the production database are performed through the automation pipeline.

These out-of-band changes case the production database to “drift” away from the schema as defined in version control.

A coworker shared with me recently that a customer is wholly investing in adopting non-relational datastores.

“Is NoSQL taking over?” they asked.

Redgate regularly holds an internal conference called Level Up week. In 2020 and 2021, this conference has been scaled to include multiple Redgate offices using a remote learning approach.

While this is an internal conference, I can share my drawings and notes from sessions I attended. I hope these inspire you with ideas on how you can contribute to learning in your own organization – or perhaps simply inspire you to give sketchnoting a try.

I wrote recently about moving my blog from Wordpress to an Azure Static Site.

Azure Static Web Apps have now moved out of Preview and are now generally available. A free tier has been announced which is great for personal blogs.