T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. This month, Marlon Ribunal (blog) asks us to talk about that one SQL Server outage we’ll never forget:

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. This month, Jeff Taylor (blog) asks us for our take on temp tables:

So, do you use temp tables, or do you pull them out wherever you find them? Make your case. I’ll be reading every post.

His whole post is worth your time, so please pop over there once you’re done here and check it out.

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. This month, Brent Ozar (blog) asks us to fill in the blank:

When I’m looking at a query, I bet it’s bad if I see ____.

Ten years (and a couple jobs) ago, I wrote about naming default constraints to avoid having SQL Server name them for you. I closed with the following statement:

SQL Server needs a name for the constraint regardless; it’s worth specifying it yourself.

We’re back with a new wrinkle in the story.

I will be presenting my latest session, Documenting Your Work for Worry-Free Vacations, in-person twice in May 2026. With summer vacations coming up, this is a perfect time of year to create or refresh your environment’s documentation so that you can leave the work computer at home, switch that phone off and relax.

This is long overdue but life and distractions happened. It’s been a little over two months since I returned home from PASS Summit 2025.

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. This month, Mike Walsh (blog) asks us:

Write two short notes to yourself. One to the past. One from the future.

Thank you for attending my PASS Summit 2025 session Answering the Auditor’s Call with Automation! I will have a more comprehensive post in the coming days. Slides and demo code are now available in Github as well as through the PASS Summit website. Github will always have the most recent version of the code. There have been additions and bug fixes!

• Github repository
• PASS Data Community Summit session info

I’ve been enjoying Ben Weissmann (Blog | LinkedIn) & Jess Pomfret’s (Blog | LinkedIn ) weekly program Finding Data Friends for a couple years now, getting to know (by proxy) more people in the data community. Every conversation with Jess & Ben is a delight, and we never seem to have enough time. So when they reached out to me a couple months ago about being on episode #123, I of course jumped at the chance. We talked a little data stuff, but that’s not what the show’s really about. It’s what we do outside work, and one thing everyone has in common - food!

In less than one month, I will be speaking not once but twice at PASS Data Community Summit 2025.

Thursday, November 20th at 1 PM I will be in the Community Zone to share my experience as a mentor for FIRST Robotics Team 3003, TANX. Hobby Huddles were a new addition to Summit last year. These lightning talk-sized presentation about something the speaker does outside their day job are a lot of fun to check out. But how do I take something I can talk about all afternoon and compress it down to only 10 minutes?