Latest AI and tech news

I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates HammerDB benchmarking for SQL Server using Docker. If you’ve ever needed to run TPC-C or TPC-H benchmarks multiple times, you know how time-consuming the manual set...

Ten years ago today, I filmed a Pluralsight Play by Play on open source PowerShell. I was standing between Jason Helmick and Jeffrey Snover, trying very hard not to look like the guy who had learned PowerShell six weeks earlier. I later wrote about t...

Yesterday I gave a talk for MSSQLTips called “Building a DBA Agent for Your SQL Server Estate”. I’ll drop the recording into this post once it’s published. What I want to do here is pull the whole thing together in writing: the demos, what I actually...

I’ve been running this blog on Hugo for a long time, and like most blogs with real history, it’s accumulated some tech debt. Some of it is my own fault. This blog started on WordPress, where it ran for seven years, and I migrated it to Hugo back in 2...

I’ve been rebuilding my three-site SQL Server demo lab, and I ran into something I’ve wanted for a long time. If you’ve ever designed a SQL Server environment on ActiveCluster, you know the pattern: two FlashArrays running a synchronously replicated ...

It’s that time of year again! EightKB is back on August 20th at 13:00 UTC, and registration is open right now. It’s completely free. No catch, just a full day of the deepest SQL Server content you’ll find anywhere on the internet....

Here’s the scenario: one of my SQL Server instances migrated to the DR array. The VM moved, the old volumes were destroyed, and nobody created a Protection Group on the destination. There were no alerts. Nothing failed....

I’m honored to announce that I’ve been renewed as a Microsoft MVP for the tenth consecutive year, recognized in the Azure SQL and SQL Server technical areas under Data Platform. Ten years. I honestly didn’t see that coming when I set a five-year goal...

I’ve been working on a project that combines two things I spend a lot of time with: MongoDB sharded clusters and Everpure FlashArrays. The goal is a production-grade backup and restore solution that avoids mongodump, doesn’t require fsyncLock, and sc...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it actually takes to make an AI agent genuinely useful for database work, both for administration and for application access to the data tier. Writing the T-SQL code is the easy part. A coding assistant can ...

If you’ve been following my T-SQL Snapshot Backup series, most of what I’ve covered requires SQL Server to participate in the snapshot: the write IO freeze, the metadata backup, the coordinated workflow. This post covers the other side of that coin: ...

If you’ve been following my T-SQL Snapshot Backup series, you’ve seen this technique work on bare-metal and standard VM deployments where database files live on volumes directly presented to the SQL Server OS. In this post, I’m bringing T-SQL Snapsho...

I’ve been doing storage load tests for SQL Server for a long time, both as a consultant and now in my work at Everpure, and I see the same patterns over and over. Someone spins up a VM with two vCPUs, points it at a storage subsystem (cloud or on-pre...

In my planned failover walkthrough, I showed what happens when you deliberately move the primary role to another replica. That’s the easy case. Now I want to show what happens when the primary pod just disappears unexpectedly, like during a node fail...

When building the sql-on-k8s-operator, I wanted to make sure it could handle both planned and unplanned failovers. The easy case is a planned failover, where you deliberately move the primary role to another replica. The harder case is an unplanned f...

I’ve been doing a deep dive into SQL Server on-disk structures lately, and one of my favorite rabbit holes is revisiting Paul Randal’s series on file header pages. If you haven’t read it, go do that now. It covers what file header pages are, what the...

Are you considering replatforming your SQL Server workload due to recent vendor changes, but still need high availability and disaster recovery? You’re not alone. One of the challenges with running SQL Server on Kubernetes is that there’s no Kubernet...

Good news for anyone who’s been working around the AVX issue I wrote about in my previous post. Microsoft has fixed it in Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) for SQL Server 2025....

If you’re like me, you’ve probably been following Microsoft’s announcement about native NVMe support in Windows Server 2025 with great interest. While it’s limited to local drives, how about we break that rule and leverage our virtualization layer ex...

Update (February 2, 2026): Microsoft has fixed this issue in SQL Server 2025 CU1. The container now runs successfully on Docker Desktop for macOS without needing OrbStack. See my follow-up post for details....

When you’re running MongoDB at scale with data distributed across multiple Pure Storage FlashArrays, achieving truly consistent backups becomes a critical and interesting technical challenge. In this post, I’m walking through an automated snapshot an...

In my previous post, I showed you how to build a snapshot backup catalog using SQL Server 2025’s new native REST API integration. But what if you’re still running SQL Server 2022? Should you miss out on this powerful capability that SQL Server and Pu...

Update for SQL Server 2025: This post and the GitHub repo have been updated for SQL Server 2025 RC1 and Ubuntu 24.04. New in SQL Server 2025: You no longer need to install the PolyBase service to interact with Parquet files in S3. Previously, with SQ...

SQL Server 2025 introduces native support for vector data types and external AI models. This opens up new scenarios for semantic search and AI-driven experiences directly in the database. But as with any external service integration, performance and ...

In modern IT environments, not all workloads require the same level of storage performance, protection, or cost. Some applications need high performance with aggressive data protection, while others are perfectly fine with lower performance in exchan...

Ollama SQL FastStart streamlines the deployment of SQL Server 2025 with integrated AI capabilities through a comprehensive Docker-based solution. This project delivers a production-ready environment combining SQL Server 2025, Ollama’s large language ...

When managing storage infrastructure at scale, one of the most powerful approaches is treating related storage resources as cohesive Workloads rather than individual components. This becomes especially important when dealing with applications like SQ...

I am honored to announce that I have been renewed as a Microsoft MVP for the ninth consecutive year, recognized in the Azure SQL and SQL Server technical areas under Data Platform. Thanks for this incredible journey that began in 2017....

I’m really excited to share some new functionality in SQL Server 2025 combined with some innovations in FlashArray’s REST API....

I’m excited to share a new open-source project I’ve been working on that combines two of my favorite areas: SQL Server and Pure Storage FlashArray performance monitoring. If you’ve been following my blog, you know I am passionate about creating tools...

SQL Server 2025 introduces a new compression algorithm called ZSTD (Zstandard), which can enhance database backup performance. Using ZSTD allows for greater control over backup performance, particularly concerning CPU usage and backup duration. I rec...

In this post, I’ll walk you through a T-SQL script that creates application-consistent snapshots on Pure Storage FlashArray, all from within SQL Server, no external tooling. SQL Server 2025 introduces a powerful new feature: the sp_invoke_external_re...

With the release of SQL Server 2025, Microsoft is firmly positioning its flagship database platform as an enterprise-ready AI solution. Having spent time with the preview builds and working with the feature set, I believe this release represents a si...

As AI continues to evolve, many of us are looking for ways to leverage large language models (LLMs) without relying on cloud services. As we learned in my previous post “Using a Local Large Language Model (LLM): Running Ollama on Your Laptop”, runnin...

You can now run powerful LLMs like Llama 3.1 directly on your laptop using Ollama. There is no cloud, and there is no cost. Just install, pull a model, and start chatting, all in a local shell....

In this post, the fifth in our series, I want to illustrate an example of using the T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in SQL Server 2022 to seed Availability Groups (AGs) with storage-based snapshots. Efficiently seeding an Availability Group is essentia...

Update (February 2026): This post has been updated to reflect the current best practices for monitoring FlashArray using OpenMetrics. Starting with Purity//FA 6.7.x, FlashArray includes a native OpenMetrics exporter, eliminating the need for a separa...

In this post, the fourth in our series, I want to share an example demonstrating SQL Server 2022’s T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in a scenario where a database spans multiple storage arrays. If you’re dealing with multi-array environments, you’ll app...

SQL Server 2025 is an upcoming release focused on AI, analytics, and modern database development, backed by innovations in mission-critical engine features for security, performance, and high availability....

I’ve migrated all presentations content over to GitHub…check it out here!...

In this post, the third in our series on using T-SQL Snapshot Backup, I will guide you through using the new T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in SQL Server 2022 to take a snapshot backup and then perform point-in-time database restores using that snapsh...

In this post, the second in our series, I will guide you through using the new T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in SQL Server 2022 to take a snapshot backup and perform point-in-time database restores using a snapshot backup as the base of the restore. ...