This month’s invitation from Mike asks us to write a couple of notes – one to our past self, and one from our future self – focused on what we were concerned about, and what we should be concerned about. I love it, and it’s been itching away at me all week. So onto the messages. First from 2025 back to 2020 Andy […]
This month’s invitation from Steve asks us about our favourite string parsing routines. It conveniently popped up as I was trying out the new Regular Expression (Regex) functions in SQL Server 2025. I adore them for handling string validation and parsing, which I’ve historically done in .Net or PowerShell. Now that we’re on the cusp of adoption […]
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday invitation from Todd asks us to consider mastery of skills. Learning is a continual cycle, a part of our everyday – be it on a personal or professional journey. Mastering is more than simply learning though. Todd hits on key terms in his invitation – commitment, planning, deliberate practice, consistency. Ticking those boxes […]
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Taiob and he’s posed a great point to consider: How is AI changing our careers? Oh boy, this could be a divisive topic with plenty of opinions – I’m seeing submissions roll in as I’m finalising this and I’m very much looking forward to the community’s views on the topic. […]
Rounding out T-SQL Tuesday for 2024, Kevin’s invitation brings it together with the Festive Tech Calendar (more on that at the end), and asks us to write about a Microsoft Data Platform announcement that could be considered a gift. For context, this post is targeted at developers or engineers who don’t have the time to dig into SQL Server […]
This month, Josephine has asked how we achieve good enough without burning out in the pursuit of perfect. When designing data solutions, aiming for perfection can lead to endless iterations, moving targets, delays, and – as Josephine points out – burnout. A quote which encapsulates the essence of this for me: Perfection is the enemy of progress Winston Churchill If […]
This month’s invitation from Louis looks for One piece of advice you wish your past self had. T-SQL Tuesday #149 had a similar topic where we gave advice to our younger selves and I made a few points. With a little more experience, I wanted to distill a couple of those: Sharing (knowledge)is caring (for yourself) Within a business, sharing […]
Tickets. Each one helps make the solutions we support more feature complete, bigger, faster, and fixed-er. This month’s invitation from Brent asks us to describe one of the last tickets which was closed to give an insight into our day to day. As an introduction: this is a response from a Development DBA who is relatively new into a […]
This month’s invitation from Reitse asks us to talk about learnings from abandoned or failed projects. This one will sit somewhere squarely between those two points. It was an opportunity to learn about scalability. Let’s set the scene. A point of sale system being rolled out across hundreds of physical locations. Transaction data collected each night to […]
This month’s invitation from Kay asks us to look back through the year and consider those who we are thankful for. Whilst I should be thanking those close to me for their ongoing support through a lot this year – the fact of it is that they aren’t the type of folks to be reading a blog about SQL […]
Andy Brownsword 