In a world of always-on learning and the relentless march of tech evolution, podcasts emerged as a quiet revolution in how I consume information. I’ve been part of several podcasts this year, including recording one earlier today with Ed Roske for the Oracle community. As a data professional and technical specialist, for me they’re more […]
2025-07-24
107 reads
Oracle treats most DDL as auto-committing, meaning once it executes, it's done. SQL Server, however, blurs that line in fascinating ways, allowing some DDL operations to be part of an explicit transaction.
2025-07-23
156 reads
The data professional’s world is changing and I know you hear this from me in editorials, blogs posts and social media, but it’s the truth. With the rise of Microsoft Fabric, we’re not just seeing another platform shift; we’re witnessing a redefinition of how data is valued, governed, and protected across the enterprise. Fabric isn’t […]
2025-07-22
243 reads
As with others, I've had to deal with death in the family recently. Some other family members are dealing with cancer (a few friends too). Happily none of us has recently been a disaster zone, but that's happened too. So yeah, big, nasty scary stuff happens in life. However, for most of us, most of […]
2025-07-19
94 reads
I was just reading about how the Philippines are working to update their databases in support of faster and better responses in the case of an emergency. While I do volunteer for some of the local emergency services, I'm right at the bottom of the heap as just a radio operator. I don't have any […]
2025-07-18
118 reads
I hop in the Jeep the other day and turn on my ham radio. Have I mentioned I'm a licensed amateur radio operator? Yeah, yeah, I know. I won't shut up about it. Ha! My call sign is KC1KCE. I haven't been on HF in a while, but I'm regularly on the air locally here […]
2025-07-16
97 reads
One of my favorite things about going to in-person events is just the time when we're sitting around chatting, out in the hallway, over at the vendor booths, maybe in the speaker room. Any of them. Inevitably, you start to get what I would call "sea stories" (Navy & Coasties, "war stories" for the pickles, […]
2025-07-14
154 reads
Working across Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, I've learned that the real challenge isn’t just knowing each platform, but understanding the subtle differences in terminology, syntax, and mindset, and staying open to learning on the fly every time I jump in. The “Sacred Six” are rules that I’ve learned to live by and accept. […]
2025-07-12
84 reads
If you’ve ever had to format dates and times in SQL, you’ve probably come across one of the most jarring realities of working across platforms: every major RDBMS does it differently and sometimes confusingly. What’s a TO_CHAR() in Oracle becomes FORMAT() or CONVERT() in SQL Server, and its sort of the same in PostgreSQL… but […]
2025-07-11
213 reads
There’s a moment I experience all too often in tech meetings, presentations, or vendor demos where someone starts talking, and instead of clarity, I get hit with a tidal wave of jargon: “synergizing AI-driven orchestration pipelines for real-time actionable insights using cloud-native microservices and agentic AI to serve as a digital twin.” And somewhere in […]
2025-07-09
134 reads
By Steve Jones
It was neat to stumble on this in the book, a piece by me,...
Forgive me for the title. Mentally I’m 12. When I started my current day...
By Steve Jones
One of the things a customer asked recently about Redgate Data Modeler was how...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Expanding into Print
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Downtime Caused by the Postgres...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The String Distance I
In SQL Server 2025, what is returned by this code:
SELECT EDIT_DISTANCE('Steve', 'Stan')
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