| | The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News by SQLServerCentral.com | | Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge |
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| Widespread New Technology Adoption This week I saw an article at Ars Technica that noted in 2025 that electrical vehicle sales had increased 28% in the US. That's quite a level of growth in adoption of this technology, especially given how set in their ways the US can be and how often these transition away from ICE vehicles has been politicized. I've had a Tesla for a little over 3 years and I think it's the best and most fun car I've over owned. The technology and convenience are amazing, and I still enjoy driving the car around. For the most part I don't have range anxiety, though I recently skipped using it on a weekend trip. The car has proven to be very inexpensive to operate and I wouldn't hesitate to purchase another EV. Apparently lots of other people feel the same, though not everyone. About 75% of new vehicles sold are still ICE vehicles, which I completely understand. Not everyone has access to regular charging at home and the cost of these vehicles, while only slightly more than ICE ones, is still much higher to start. That hasn't stopped many people from evaluating and choosing to purchase a car that runs on battery technology. However, plenty of people just don't want to adopt new technology. I see the same thing in the tech industry. GenAI has been quite the disrupter the last few years, but many people don't trust models and don't want to try to use them. I've also seen many people who blindly trust this new technology, which can be even worse. I've seen the same type of attitude in the past with DevOps, PowerShell, NoSQL and other technologies. Many people are slow to adopt new technology, for a variety of reasons. It might be they aren't sure the technology really offers any improvement, which is understandable. After all, if something new doesn't actually provide significant benefits, is it worth an investment? After all the investment is a cost and there are likely some downsides. There are other people who are resistant to any change or unmotivated to bother, preferring to stick with what they know and are comfortable with using. I don't quite understand this view, as it's entirely possible we originally learned a poor way of doing things. It's also likely that as technology changes, there are improvements made from our learnings in the industry. Certainly doctors, mechanical engineers, architects, lawyers, and more adopt new practices because their professions evolve and move in new ways, so why should technology professionals be different? I'd like to think that the reason many people don't bother to learn new (or improve existing) skills or adopt new tools is that they don't have time. We're all under pressure to get work done, and often without any planning for our various administrative work and meetings, let alone time to invest in ourselves. However, I will say that finding a way to carve out time to read, experiment, and practice skills has helped me improve my own career prospects, as well as helped me convince employers to match my investment with their own time, resources, and funding. Steve Jones - SSC Editor Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums |
| The Weekly News | | All the headlines and interesting SQL Server information that we've collected over the past week, and sometimes even a few repeats if we think they fit. |
| Vendors/3rd Party Products |
| This article will cover the basics of the Flyway generate command and how it can auto-generate several types of Flyway migration scripts. This includes versioned migrations that, after testing, can be used to deploy changes, and baseline migration and undo scripts that are useful for a range of development tasks. |
| To celebrate International Women’s Day 2025, we asked women in Redgate’s Technology function about their careers, how they got into tech in the first place, and the advice they’d give to others starting out in the field. Here’s what they said… |
| AI/Machine Learning/Cognitive Services |
| One of the cornerstones of AI is a concept called embeddings. Virtually every AI model, whether for text, video, or audio, uses something related to embeddings. Starting with SQL Server 2025, this is a term you’ll be hearing a lot, as its potential for applications is enormous! In this post, I want to offer a more didactic explanation of embeddings, especially for those who haven’t had the opportunity to explore the world of AI or machine learning. |
| A new pair of AI benchmarks could help developers ... |
| Is 2025 the year that the AI advances of recent years finally deliver significant results to corporate bottom lines worldwide? I believe the answer is yes. The technology has... |
| Career, Employment, and Certifications |
| AI is transforming the job market, raising concern... |
| This month’s T-SQL Tuesday blog party is hosted by Deborah Melkin – Data Platform MVP, WIT co-lead and WITspiration founder. Deb’s invitation is to blog about mentoring and sponsorship. What... The... |
| Deborah Melkin is hosting the community T-SQL Tuesday #184 carnival of blog posts. Her topic is one that is near and dear to her – and also near and... |
| T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. This month, Deborah Melkin (blog) asks us to talk about our relationship with mentoring and... |
| This month’s T-SQL Tuesday blog party is hosted by Deborah Melkin, and it’s a good one that asks us where we are making the world better. The topic is... The... |
| “A true mentor is someone who sees more talent and ability within you than you see in yourself, and helps bring it out of you.” — Bob Proctor “I... |
| Thank you to Deborah Melkin for hosting TSQL Tuesday this month! I’ve always considered mentoring and sponsorship very structured. Now, I wonder if they’re also small things we do... The... |
| This month’s T-SQL Tuesday blog party is hosted by Deborah Melkin – Data Platform MVP, WIT co-lead and WITspiration founder. Deb’s invitation is to blog about mentoring and sponsorship. What... |
| Happy T-SQL Tuesday! Even though it’s my topic, I still found this post hard to write about because there’s so much I want to say. Why I Mentor? The... |
| Conferences, Classes, Events, and Webinars |
| PASS Summit 2025 & PASS Summit On Tour 2025 Call for Speakers is now open! We’re anticipating over 275 sessions across Seattle, New York, Dallas, and Utrecht, the Netherlands. So, whether you’re looking to make your speaking debut or you’re already an experienced presenter, we want to hear from you. |
| Want to really level up your SQL game? I mean, g... |
| PowerShell 3.0 introduced several notable improvements to its cmdlet library, with one of the most useful features in this release being the simplified syntax for the Where-Object cmdlet. This enhancement made filtering objects more efficient and user-friendly by introducing Property and Value parameters and a switch parameter for every comparison operator. |
| Data Mining / Data Analysis |
| Countless digital documents hold valuable info, and the AI industry is attempting to set it free. |
| DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) |
| Protecting Your CI/CD from Build-Time Threats DevOps has transformed software delivery, but with rapid deployments come increased security risks. As a DevOps engineer, I’ve seen firsthand how small security... |
| GitHub is one of the most popular services on the planet for storing documents. That includes everything from PowerPoint presentations to recipes, but it’s the de facto standard for... |
| ETL/SSIS/Azure Data Factory/Biml |
| Unexpected (and unwanted) data transformation prob... |
| This guide will walk you through the steps to delete a topic, will discuss best practices, and will explore advanced considerations to know for setting up and deleting topics in the future. |
| How to easily implement conditional formatting through visual calculations in Power BI. |
| Microsoft Fabric ( Azure Synapse Analytics, OneLake, ADLS, Data Science) |
| Since Lakehouse is one of the key items within Microsoft Fabric, it is important to know how to write data into it in various formats and using different tools. One of the most common tools is notebooks, as they provide great flexibility and speed for development and testing with graphical outputs. |
| Fabric Database was a great announcement during Ignite Conference. The announcement spread all around, a great new feature. This feature seems simple, especially for everyone who already knows about Azure SQL. However, we don’t need to dig too deep to discover the small secrets this feature has. Secrets that can easily cause mistakes with bad consequences. Let’s understand a bit more about this. |
| In today’s data-driven world, organizations need the ability to analyze and act on data as it flows in real time. Microsoft Fabric provides a powerful ecosystem for real-time intelligence,... The... |
| This blog below explains how to use a Python only notebook to get all the Fabric items using the Fabric REST API. NOTE: At the time of this blog... |
| Reading Time: 6 minutesIn this post I want to show how you can operationalize fabric-cicd to work with Microsoft Fabric and Azure DevOps. Which I exclusively revealed... |
| Performance Tuning SQL Server |
| SQL Server Performance Office Hours Episode 4 If I... |
| IT leaders have a lot on their plates! Budgets, st... |
| PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI |
| If you’re still using the Publish button in Power BI Desktop, there’s a better and more efficient way to manage your reports while saving time. By leveraging OneDrive and... |
| Wouldn’t it be great if we could create a Python... |
| There is a new botnet that is infecting TP-Link routers: The botnet can lead to command injection which then makes remote code execution (RCE) possible so that the malware can... |
| Lots of interesting details in the story: The US Department of Justice on Wednesday announced the indictment of 12 Chinese individuals accused of more than a decade of hacker intrusions... |
| 0-day exploited by maliciously crafted web content to break out of security sandbox. |
| A new Consumer Reports assessment revealed the serious security gaps in some AI voice cloning tools that cybercriminals are exploiting with minimal effort to commit fraud. The findings raise... |
| T-SQL and Query Languages |
| RIGHT JOIN is an esoteric feature in the SQL language, and hardly ever seen in the real world, because almost every RIGHT JOIN can just be expressed as an equivalent LEFT JOIN. The following two statements are equivalent: |
| Prior to SQL Server 2008, we could only insert a s... |
| A Short PSA On Transaction Count, ROLLBACK, and CO... |
| All About SQL Server Stored Procedures: Isolation Levels Going Further If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering... |
| We published an article recently at SQL Server Central on Tally Tables in Fabric from John Miner. In it he showed how this can be efficient. A day after... The... |
| Our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, now includes a very large number of tools, with procedures, functions, and views. Users that are new to working with sequences... |
| If you’re an experienced SQL user eager to sharpen your expertise with real-world challenges, the March SQL Practice is the perfect opportunity. This month’s challenge is designed for advanced... The... |
| THE VIDEO THE SYNOPSIS In this video, I demonstrate how order of operations matters when it comes to casting or converting a data type and performing an aggregation on... |
| All About SQL Server Stored Procedures: Some Notes On Locking Hints Going Further If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my... |
| To insert new rows into a table, you will mostly use the INSERT statement. In the example above, I've inserted one row into the dbo.CinemaGroups table. There are a... |
| AI is advancing and displacing women’s careers. ... |
| Executives are placing more trust in AI than colle... |
| As enterprises tackle complex integrations and dat... |
| Software developer plans to appeal after admitting... |
| Report: Strict enforcement comes as Vodafone is reducing domestic office space. |
| ServiceNow expands its AI capabilities with the acquisition of Moveworks, adding 500 employees and enhancing enterprise-wide AI adoption for major companies. The post ServiceNow Buys AI Startup Moveworks for $2.85B:... |
| The AI cloud provider has secured an $11.9 billion deal with OpenAI ahead of its IPO. The post $11.9B AI Deal: Altman Calls CoreWeave ‘An Important Addition’ to OpenAI appeared... |
| Cursor AI tells user, "I cannot generate code for ... |
| I'm not entirely sure I understand the first item today, but maybe you can help. I pulled a couple of older items from the backlog to round out this timely... |
| In the US, customers are buying while there are still incentives, no extra tariffs. |
| We spend a week with BMW's regular all-wheel drive electric sedan. |
| Virtualization and Containers/Kubernetes |
| Cloud waste persists in Kubernetes environments, while automation offers both cost savings and operational benefits. |
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