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 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. […]
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 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 […]
This month’s invitation from Steve asks us to about how window functions have made life easier for us. Before we get into that let’s have a brief recap of what window functions are for those who aren’t familiar. What are they? Window functions are like regular functions we’d use in a result set such as SUM() or MIN() but more […]
This month’s invitation from Tom Zika asks us to consider production code and consider what quality makes the code ‘production grade’. It’s interesting to think about all of the areas we may want to consider before putting some code into production – has it been reviewed, has it gone through sufficient testing, does it perform well […]
This month’s invitation from Glenn is to write about what we’ve been doing with SQL Server 2022 as we’ve now had a release candidate unleashed upon the world. Personally I haven’t had the time to adventure through the new features or put any stress onto the version as of yet – the exception being testing […]
This month’s invitation comes from Mala who asks us about the T-SQL coding rules relevant for where we work. There’s certainly a lot of scope in this question and Mala links to a great set of posts from Robert Sheldon which cover quite a number of these points. Whilst larger businesses may well have matured standards in […]
Andy Brownsword 