Introduction to GitHub Actions Part 1: Getting Started
This article series will teach you what you need to know to take advantage of GitHub Actions, especially for deploying database code.
2025-04-07
Additional Articles
DAX CASE Statement Functionality using IF, SWITCH and SWITCH True
If you don’t know, DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) is a language for creating custom calculations and aggregations in Power Pivot, Power BI, and other data analysis tools. Two functions in DAX come close to replicating the functionality but come with limitations. Which one of these functions should you use?
2025-04-04
Scales & Measurements
If you’re going to work with databases, you probably ought to know something about data. In particular, we don’t put data directly into a database; we have to encode it and represent it in a format which a machine can handle.
2025-04-02
Finding Out What Changed in a Cumulative Update
Over the last several years, Microsoft has been putting less and less effort into Cumulative Update documentation. We used to get full-blown knowledge base articles about fixes, but these days, we get a collection of footnotes with deceiving hyperlinks that look like they’re going to lead to more information – but they simply lead back to themselves.
2025-03-31
Basic Regex Emulator for SQL Server
Regular expressions (REGEX) let you adaptively investigate, employ, and authenticate text data. This makes it easy to search for simple or complex string patters. There is no direct way to do this in SQL Server, but in this article we look at some SQL functions you can create to emulate regex like functionality.
2025-03-28
Beyond Single-Cloud: A Peek into Multi-Cloud
The digital landscape is rapidly evolving, and the question has progressed from whether to adopt cloud technology to how to effectively use it to drive business growth and innovation. Having recognized the power of the cloud in terms of agility, scalability and innovation, organizations are turning their focus to how to get more from their investment. One such consideration is multi-cloud.
2025-03-26
SQL Server JSON Functions JSON_OBJECTAGG and JSON_ARRAYAGG
I need to construct JSON from data in our database, but I find the existing FOR JSON PATH limited when the data is not located in one single row but rather scattered over multiple rows. Is there another method on how to handle JSON data in SQL Server? Learn how to use the new SQL Server JSON Functions JSON_OBJECTAGG and JSON_ARRAYAGG in this article.
2025-03-24
Crazy number of Parameters… and a challenge
The other day, my lovable coworker and frequent Simple Talk writer: Grant Fritchey, sent this post on X:
2025-03-21
AI Tools for Job Seekers – Salary
In our conversations with job seekers, a consistent theme has been HOW do you use AI tools. This can be used to get new ideas, improve and optimize resumes, understand trends/market data, determine new connections and networking avenues, save time, alleviate headaches and roadblocks, and be more efficient and effective overall. Well, say goodbye to the days where you need to start a cover letter or resume from scratch or feel isolated, alone, and anxious during the resume writing, interview prep, salary negotiation, and other parts of the job search process, as we all now have an incredibly powerful job searching tool and career coach at our disposal to help with any writer’s block and almost every challenge you may run into!
2025-03-19
AI in SQL Server 2025: Embeddings
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!
2025-03-17
Blogs
AI: Blog a Day – Day 8: RAG – Retrieval Augmented Generation
By Vinay Thakur
RAG — Retrieval Augmented Generation. we have covered so far — embeddings, vectors, vector...
AI: Blog a Day – Day 7: Vector and Vector Databases
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 6 we learned Embeddings, Semantic Search and Checks, on Day 7...
AI: Blog a Day – Day 6: Embeddings – How AI Understands
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 5 where we covered notebooks, HuggingFace and fine tuning AI now...
Forums
Not Just an Upgrade
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Restoring On Top I
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Designing Delta Tables with Liquid Clustering: Real-World Patterns for Data Engineers
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Question of the Day
Restoring On Top I
I am doing development work on a database and want to keep a backup so I can reset my database. I make some changes and want to restore over top of my changes. When I run this code, what happens?
USE Master BACKUP DATABASE DNRTest TO DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' GO USE DNRTest GO CREATE TABLE MyTest(myid INT) GO USE master RESTORE DATABASE DNRTest FROM DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' WITH REPLACESee possible answers