This whole post is an off-topic shower-thought type of post, and has nothing to do with SQL Server. But as a fellow technologist, I think you might enjoy it anyway. I started thinking about nostalgia the other day. You know, that warm and fuzzy, and occasionally slightly melancholic, emotion we all get sometimes. I’ve been… Continue reading The illogical longing for scarcity
This is a topic that I’ve been passionate about for many years. I had a discussion with someone today that inspired me to actually write an article about it. So many of my consulting industry colleagues seem to think that “value-based” pricing, also refered to as “fixed price”, is some kind of magical cheat code… Continue reading Off topic: My thoughts on value-based pricing
At the November announcement of SQL Server 2025, a ton of cool new features were unveiled. It’s obviously very heavy on AI and Fabric, but those are the times we live in. If you squint a little, tough, you can make out quite a few really nice developer-centric features. And if you know anything about… Continue reading JSON indexes in SQL Server: First impressions
Stay with me. This is not clickbait! I made you a script so you can create your own SQL Server database using the public IMDB dataset. All you need is a SQL Server 2022, Powershell 7, and a little time. If you didn’t know, the IMDB dataset is public, and you can download it for… Continue reading The best ten years for movies were 1994-2003, and I have proof
In case you missed it, I designed a solution last year to collect session feedback for my annual Data Saturday Stockholm event, and I made this solution publicly available to anyone who runs a similar event. The setup is really simple – you just plug in a Sessionize API key, it collects all the necessary… Continue reading Collect and report session feedback for your Data/SQL Saturday event!
Recently, my home ISP has started changing my public IP address. This causes me some headache because I have a couple of Azure Network Security Group rules (think of them as firewall rules) that specifically allow my home IP access to all of my Azure resources. When my home IP changes, those rules have to be updated accordingly. So I made a PowerShell-based solution to automatically maintain them.
R2 is Cloudflare’s own implementation of AWS S3 storage, with some big benefits – one of them being no egress fees, which is great if you want to publish or distribute a lot of data (like I did with this demo database). In this post, I thought I’d briefly document how to set up R2,… Continue reading How to use Cloudflare R2 for SQL Server backups
As part of spending waaaaaay to much time trying to solve the 2023 Advent of Code challenges, I came across multiple instances where I had to dust off some old math that I hadn’t paid attention to since I went to school back in the 90ies. So for my own convenience, and yours, I’ve built… Continue reading T-SQL math patterns
You can get into a situation where you have two tables with values associated with date ranges. What’s worse, those date ranges don’t necessarily have to align, which can make joining them a seemingly complex task, but it is surprisingly simple when you learn how to think of overlapping date ranges, along with this relatively… Continue reading How to join overlapping date ranges
A question from a client got me thinking. Relational databases (at least the ones I know and love) can’t really index for queries that use LIKE queries for a substring of a column value. If you want to search for strings beginning with a given string, a regular rowstore index will have you covered. If… Continue reading Indexing for substring search