In 1999 I released my first commercial software product. ShutOff 2000 was a Windows application that could log off or shut down Windows in multiple ways. It was successful enough that a serial number generator…
A few years ago I took a new job at Microsoft, working as a Senior Content Developer, and as of this writing I own all the SQL Server content in Microsoft Docs. Not bad. After…
Forgive me for the title. Mentally I’m 12. When I started my current day job, I certainly didn’t expect to write this many blog posts about Git. I don’t fancy myself an expert by any…
The setup My day job involves babysitting a lot of Git repositories hosted on GitHub. The vast majority of the commits, merges, and squashes I run on a daily basis involve short-lived branches, and I…
Short version (Edit 2025-11-26: If you still want to use containers, Anthony Nocentino has the answer for you here: https://www.nocentino.com/posts/2025-11-26-sql-server-2025-docker-desktop-avx-issue/) You want to get this running as fast as possible. Do these four steps, and…
The honeymoon is over, and macOS 26 Tahoe broke the Rosetta 2 emulation layer with SQL Server 2025 RC 1 running in a Docker container. I know it was Tahoe, because it worked the day…
Part of my job at work is to update Transact-SQL reference content. System dynamic management views (DMVs) have permissions that are managed in the SQL Server Database Engine source code, so it’s a little tricky…
Yes, SSMS 21 uses the Visual Studio installer. No, you don’t need to download it every time. No, you don’t need a Visual Studio license to use it.
Three years ago, when the first public preview of SQL Server 2022 (CTP 2.0) was announced, I was a few months in at the SQL Docs team, and had very little to do with that…
I wrote a stream-of-consciousness post a few months ago about what I do in my day job at Microsoft, working in the Database Docs team. Basically we spend most of our day in an obscure…
On behalf of every database administrator everywhere, I implore you not to run CHKDSK on a system that has a live database installed and running. This includes, but is not limited to: SQL Server PostgreSQL…
A discussion on LinkedIn led to this hypothetical “real world” question: Problem statement: I have a SQL Server 2000 database backup that I need to restore to a supported version of SQL Server (preferably SQL…
I started working at Microsoft in January 2022. I enjoy it. I even wrote a stream-of-consciousness post about it last year. A significant part of our job in the Database Docs team, is to resolve…
EDIT: 2024-04-30 I have closed my hosting company, and this site now lives on a Hetzner server in Germany. Original post continues below. I’ve had a really disappointing experience with the Liquid Web sales team,…
A couple of months ago where I work, a major product started undergoing a rebrand. I don’t pretend to understand marketing folks, but a change this big needed to be well-coordinated. As of this writing,…
