Someone asked why I would use TRY_PARSE after I posted a question at SQL Server Central: Getting the Average. Isn’t is slower? A fair question. This quick post looks at why.Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.A Quick SetupThe question above has the setup code, but what if I add another row? For example, I’ll run this .insert dbo.commission( salesperson , commission)values(‘Steve’, ‘A’)Now, let’s look at the data and run the query from the question.This works. However, let’s remove the (slow) TRY_PARSE() from the aggregate.Error. Why?…
Author: drweb
Rio is a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust that gives you built-in tabs, splits, and a command palette. So you get most of what people use tmux for, without the extra layer. It also installs on any modern Linux distribution in about a minute. You’ve probably switched terminal emulators a few times and ended up going back to the default. Not because the new one was bad, but because you SSH into a server, run htop, and get an unknown terminal type error. That’s usually when the new terminal gets blamed and uninstalled, even though the problem isn’t really…
Validating AI-generated index recommendations is the step between a persuasive script and a change you can defend in production.AI-generated index recommendations look persuasive. Consider an illustrative script promising a 92 percent cost reduction. It adds three keys and eight included columns to the busiest order table. The suggestion is specific, confident, and ready to copy.Two existing indexes already cover most of that shape. The DBA now faces an awkward choice. Accept the projected gain today, or question it while users stay slow. Creating another index feels safer than asking one more question.The Script Is a Candidate, Not a VerdictNative missing-index…
For years, DevOps had a pretty straightforward mission: help teams ship reliable software faster by getting development and operations folks working together. Tools like automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, and better observability have all been key pieces of the puzzle. But now, things are shifting again. This time, artificial intelligence is changing the whole landscape.AI isn’t just some fancy code-completion tool anymore. Modern engineering teams are building it into almost every stage of how they deliver software. From writing deployment pipelines, to troubleshooting incidents, and analyzing data, AI is stepping into each corner. People are starting to…
Disclaimer: Rather than spending time writing a test scenario from scratch, I used Claude Code to generate the test scenarios for this article. I wanted a certain behavior to demonstrate a couple of differences between #temp and @table. You can download the test scripts from my public GitHub repo (see info at the bottom of this post).#temp tables can be useful in so many ways. I hadn’t really given them much thought beyond using them when a situation called for it, until I saw the invitation for T-SQL Tuesday #201 Invitation: Temp Tables, Friend or Foe? This month’s T-SQL Tuesday…
This month we have a new host, which I am grateful for. So many people have stopped blogging that it’s a challenge to keep this going. Jeff Taylor has an invite asking us about a core T-SQL topic that can affect the performance of your app and your server: temp tables.This is an interesting one for me, as I’ve changed my mind on these over the years, especially as Microsoft has made improvements to the SQL Server storage engine and query processor that have helped tempdb to perform better.They’ve also added things that can impact and load tempdb.If you want…
DevOps.com is now providing a weekly DevOps jobs report through which opportunities for DevOps professionals will be highlighted as part of an effort to better serve our audience.Our goal in these challenging economic times is to make it just that much easier for DevOps professionals to advance their careers.Of course, the pool of available DevOps talent is still relatively constrained, so when one DevOps professional takes on a new role, it tends to create opportunities for others.The ten job postings shared this week are selected based on the company looking to hire, the vertical industry segment and naturally, the pay…
Standardized developer environments promise to eliminate one of software engineering’s oldest explanations: “It works on my machine.” By packaging approved runtimes, dependencies and tools into containers, virtual machines or cloud workspaces, organizations expect every developer to start from the same foundation.The approach delivers clear benefits. It reduces onboarding time, minimizes dependency conflicts and makes development environments easier to reproduce. Yet developers using the same environment definition can still experience different build times, test results, network behavior or access failures. Local results may also differ from CI and production, despite sharing the same container image.A container defines only part of the…
SQL Server cost optimization has a problem nobody puts on the slide. The savings are real, the dollars are real, and none of it reaches the invoice. This is the story of how I found that out in front of people.I want to tell you about the best week of work I did last year, and then about the two hours at the end of it that I am significantly less proud of.There was a query on the busiest instance in the estate doing four point one million logical reads. I spent three days on it. Statistics, an index, a…
TL;DR — Key Takeaways Claude Code auto mode becomes the default on August 14 for Pro, Max and Team users. In testing, humans caught a disguised dangerous command just 13.6% of the time, while auto mode caught 89%. Production data cited by Anthropic showed serious unintended harm in 6.3% of manually approved sessions versus 2.4% with auto mode. The shift does not eliminate human oversight; it moves responsibility toward defining boundaries and permissions before an agent begins working. Enterprise, API and major cloud users remain opt-in for now, with broader default rollout expected later. Anthropic is removing a step most…