I was in a social media discussion the other day where someone said “Perfection isn’t real, but progress is.” This started me thinking, is there really no perfection? Can you not actually create a piece of software that is perfect? Of course you can. As long as your requirements are perfect, and the code does […]
2024-06-08
106 reads
Or for short, “Why you have to play the game” “Don't tell me the odds”, cried out Han Solo just before doing something that seemed impossible. How on Coruscant did he do that? Well, as a certain director said about a certain floating door in a galaxy we all call home. ”It was in the […]
2024-05-18
86 reads
I want to make this a participation topic. When you are working, do you listen to music or do you need quiet? And if it isn’t music, do you do something else? TV, movies? For me, it is almost always music. As I write my first Database Weekly newsletter editorial in a few months, I […]
2024-04-20
162 reads
Database Mirroring comes back to SQL, at least to Azure SQL Database with Fabric as the destination. Read a few of Steve's thoughts on this feature.
2024-03-30
460 reads
Reserved resources in Azure can auto renew now, but Steve isn't sure if that makes our jobs easier.
2024-03-23
120 reads
Steve thinks that the growth of private clouds make sense, especially as more companies turn to platform engineering.
2024-02-03
99 reads
During one my yearly review, I got one particularly interesting piece of feedback. “You need to share the work you are doing and share with the company.” This is basically a matter of letting people know about the stuff we are putting out on Simple-Talk.com. It is something that is regularly done here, but to […]
2024-01-27
90 reads
Generative AI is everywhere, but especially in software development. Is it helping us? Steve has a few thoughts.
2024-01-06
110 reads
I hate coming up with ideas for editorials, but my last editorial of the year gives me a very simple topic just staring me in the face: New Year’s Resolutions. Love them or hate them (or it we are honest, a good bit of both,) this end of one year and the start of another […]
2023-12-30
168 reads
Love is many a splendored thing. It is also a much-abused word with many different (and twisted) meanings. The type of love I wish to speak about today is not friendship, nor the kind of thing that makes your heart go pitter patter in the springtime, but rather the type of love known as storge, […]
2023-12-09
69 reads
By Steve Jones
If someone is trying to convince you it’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s a...
By Steve Jones
I was looking back at my year and decided to see if SQL Prompt...
In the era of cloud-native applications, Kubernetes has become the default standard platform for...
Hi experts, I have a 3+ TB database on a 2019 sql server which...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The North Star for the...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Escape Characters
In SQL Server 2025, I run this code (in a database with the appropriate collation):
SELECT UNISTR('%*3041%*308A%*304C%*3068 and good night', '%*') AS 'A Classic';
What is returned? See possible answers