Taiob Ali is asking how AI is changing our careers. It’s a good question – one question worth reflecting on, even if the general perception among many people I talk to is ‘not much yet’. There are definitely plenty of people who use AI to help with emails, or as a replacement search engine, and […]| LobsterPot Solutions
John Sterrett asks us where the next generation is. Well, not quite. He asks us what we’re doing, or could be, to encourage younger people to get involved in the SQL community while increasing the number of younger speakers. I’ll come back to the ‘what I’m doing’ question. First let’s talk about the age-demographic of […]| LobsterPot Solutions
This month, my good friend and fellow Dune-fan Joe Fleming (@muaddba.bsky.social) from SQL Tailor Consulting asks us about weird problems, and in particular, how we troubleshoot them. Now, ‘weird’ is an interesting word to use, and Joe actually says “weird or unique”. I’m imagining those times when someone looks at something and is surprised by […]| LobsterPot Solutions
There are some things I really like about SQL Agent Jobs, which is why I’m secretly quite fond of this month’s T-SQL Tuesday topic, from Andy Levy. Of course, there are some things that I don’t like about SQL Agent. For example, I’ve never been a big fan of the Operator stuff. I’m sure there […]| LobsterPot Solutions
Mentoring is one of the ways I like to sow into the technical community. I feel like the community is much more about the individuals in it than the masses. Plus, it’s efficient – I can put my own time into things, but if I help other people develop a love for the community and […]| LobsterPot Solutions
Steve Jones (@way0utwest@bluesky), who has coordinated the T-SQL Tuesday blog party since Adam Machanic stepped down, is also hosting this month. And he asks us about database permissions. How we check who has access to what within the database. I’m going to focus on whether people have access to sensitive data, rather than whether people […]| LobsterPot Solutions
I am NOT suggesting that data integrity is irrelevant. Not at all. But how often do we need an enforced primary key or foreign key? Be warned – I’m not actually going to come to a conclusion in this post. I’m going to make cases for both sides, and let you choose where you stand. […]| LobsterPot Solutions
It’s my turn to host T-SQL Tuesday again. It’s been a while for me. I think the last time was when the topic was Plan Operators and my round-up included a clickable imagemap of a query plan, complete with a Paul White operator, and way too many Lookups. I’ve been contributing to T-SQL Tuesday every […]| LobsterPot Solutions
Nine Christmases ago, in late November 2015, Microsoft released Service Pack 3 for SQL Server 2012, and included a gift just for me! Only kind of just for me, really for everyone, but I think it fits for Kevin Chant’s T-SQL Tuesday topic for this month. I had written to Santa (okay, the product group […]| LobsterPot Solutions
I don’t like to write about client situations, but this one seemed worth mentioning for the sake of other people experiencing the same thing, so I asked my client for permission and they agreed. Following an on-prem server reboot, anything that tried to connect to SQL Server on that server, using Windows Authentication, was getting […]| LobsterPot Solutions
If you’ve found this post because you’re trying to figure out how to get SQL Server to run locally on a Copilot+ PC with a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, then I’m sorry you’re going to be disappointed. Last week, I knew I needed to say goodbye to the laptop I’ve had for 4.5 years (I got […]| LobsterPot Solutions