Git forked
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…
More fun with Git: git restore
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…
Run SQL Server 2025 and SQL Server Management Studio on macOS Tahoe
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…
Get required permissions for DMVs
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…
What’s new in SQL Server 2025 CTP 2.0
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…
The hell of Git line endings and the (not so) simple fix
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…
Choco upgrade, y’all
Chocolatey is a package manager for Windows, like the built-in package managers on Linux, and third-party ones on macOS like Homebrew and MacPorts. The idea is this: when you’re setting up a machine, you don’t…
Read the error message
This post is brought to you — indirectly — from a boss I loved working for, on a project which almost killed me, at a company which I had to walk away from to restore…
Using the Xero OAuth 2.0 API from a .NET Core console application
[Edited on 5 August 2021 with some pseudocode at the end.] This is not a post about SQL Server, but I need to write about something that I’ve been struggling with for a number of…
Using indexed views? What is an imprecise or non-deterministic convert?
After last week’s post about using WITH (NOEXPAND) to query indexed views even on SQL Server Enterprise Edition, this week is a short but interesting side-road into deterministic values, and why it is important to…
Using indexed views? Don’t forget this important tip.
Today after fighting with designing a view that let me create a clustered index on it (indexed views — also known as materialized views — are awesome in the right context!), I kept running into the same…
Convert legacy password storage without aggravating your users
In a previous post I wrote about storing password hashes in a database, which raises the question of how to convert an existing legacy password storage system to use hashes (or even no passwords!) without annoying the…
What is a container anyway?
Recently there was a thread on Twitter which established that a lot of IT people didn’t know the difference between virtual machines and containers. https://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1137737702227550208 I felt like this was a question I’d already answered,…
Containers and data: you gotta keep ’em separated
There was an interesting conversation on Twitter recently, between Grant Fritchey (blog | twitter), Kenneth Fisher (blog | twitter), Anthony E. Nocentino (blog | twitter), Vicky Harp (twitter), and me about containers and SQL Server.…
SQL Server containers no longer being updated in the Docker registry
In October 2018, Microsoft announced a change to the source of their Docker containers. You should be using the new Microsoft Container Registry (MCR) as the source for official Docker container images for Microsoft products.…