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
There’s a technique that I’ve been using for some time now, and been looking for going even further back, which has become immediately available to everyone who can see a query plan (version permitting). Some years back (ok, it was 2010), I started to present at conferences about SARGability and residual predicates. I had a […]| LobsterPot Solutions
For those people who seek seeks, here’s a “Pro Tip”. Suppose you have a query that involves a Scan. It can be a Clustered Index Scan or an Index Scan, it really doesn’t matter. If it’s a Table Scan, then you have a Heap in play, and this tip doesn’t apply. I’m looking for the […]| LobsterPot Solutions
Take a look at this query plan. Yes, that arrow indicates a single row. This is an Index Seek, returning a single row. And yet it’s rubbish. That’s right – it’s rubbish! In fact, I had to provide a hint for it to use this index. A table scan would’ve been better, and this is […]| 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
Erik Darling insisted on a video for T-SQL Tuesday this month. If you’re more of a text person… The video shows how you can get the ‘map mode’ behaviour of the scroll bar in older versions of SSMS – it’s just that SSMS 21 has it this way by default.| 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 was the host for T-SQL Tuesday this month, inviting people to write about integrity. And because I don’t believe in just providing a list of posts (although I’ve also done that at the end of the post), I have a completely fabricated story for you. And no, this wasn’t created using AI. I have […] The post Round-up for T-SQL Tuesday 182 – Integrity appeared first on LobsterPot Solutions.| 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
Ideas for designing a user-friendly, scalable and re-usable Star Schema by interpreting an existing report or report mock-ups| 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
Louis Davidson (@drsql) asks what advice we wish we’d had – particularly when we were starting out first data platform job. I’m not really sure when that was. I did computing at university, and in the mid-90s I was working as a Research Assistant writing code under a couple of professors who were in the Artificial […]| LobsterPot Solutions
When is the right time to move to new technology? Andy Leonard asks about balancing new features and proven technology. And certainly the challenge is real. I see new features get released, and part of me would love to have all my customers using them. But there is always a cost, and I don’t like […]| LobsterPot Solutions
At LobsterPot Solutions one of the things we often do for our clients is participate in job interviews, to help get a feel for the technical ability of the people they’re considering. This post is not an advert for those services, it’s to help readers of this blog to see my perspective on interviews, in […]| LobsterPot Solutions
Pinal Dave (@pinaldave), who might always exist in my mind as the person who took me to a KFC in Bengaluru, asks us about how AI has helped our roles as SQL professionals. Part of me wants to say it hasn’t. To say that what I do in SQL is more complicated than artificial intelligence […]| LobsterPot Solutions
The SQL Server platform is a robust system, designed to handle data in a relational system through the “ACID” properties of transactions. That is, to ensure that any piece of work (a transaction) would be atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable. Failing to achieve these properties would make the environment very hard to use, because you […]| LobsterPot Solutions