The Bit Bucket

I’ve heard several people complaining that Azure Data Factory (ADF) is expensive to use, and yet I’ve seen many others talking about it as a really low cost service.

So which is true?

Our experience

We’re very careful about which features of ADF that we use as there are a few that can increase the cost substantially. And without those, it becomes a very low cost service.

None of my current clients has any issue with ADF costs. The people that I hear complaining about the cost are using one or both of:

2025-07-05

Years ago, I used to always recommend that people install Books Online (BOL) on their systems. It’s ironic that it was called “Online”, given we’re really talking about “Offline”, but back when we first were talking about it, we were comparing it to a physical book, not to a live reference on a computer screen.

Nowadays though, I find that the version online is so far superior to the one that you can install locally, that I think it’s better to just use the online version. I particularly like the way that the online books are now cross-version ie: each page covers all supported versions, instead of having a separate page for each version.

2025-07-04

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Development Level: Medium

Question:

You are reviewing T-SQL code from an application.

You notice in the definition of some tables, the timestamp data type has been used. In other tables, the rowversion data type has been used for similar purposes.

2025-07-03

When I’m doing a lot of query editing, I often get a bit mesmerized, particularly if there’s a lot of manual copy and paste or cut and paste going on.

One thing that often drives me crazy is when I use Ctrl-C (ie: copy) when I meant to use Ctrl-V (ie: paste). Invariably, I do this when I have nothing highlighted at all. So not only did I not get the value pasted, I just copied an empty value into the clipboard.

2025-07-02

My friends at PackT recently sent me a review copy of fellow MVP Greg Deckler’s third edition of Learn Microsoft Power BI . It’s not released yet but is available for pre-order.

Production quality and additional resources

The book is written well and the copy and tech editing seem well handled.

I was particularly impressed to see that Art Tennick was a tech reviewer. I regularly mention Art’s books. I like the way he presents recipe style books. He did it with MDX and again with DAX. Many people don’t want a detailed coverage of a language, just a series of recipes on how to use it. That’s what some of Art’s books provide.

2025-07-01

Visual Studio is a very configurable tool, and particularly in the area of keyboard shortcuts. Because SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is based on Visual Studio, it inherits many of these configuration options. SSMS has a very rich set of keyboard shortcuts. Without trying to cover most of them, I do want to highlight a few that I think are really important to know how to use.

Let’s start with an easy set of commands.

2025-06-30

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Development Level: Advanced

Question:

You are reviewing T-SQL code from an application.

You notice that a view includes WITH SCHEMA_BINDING in its declaration.

What does that affect?

Answer:

Adding WITH SCHEMA_BINDING to a view definition ensures that the underlying objects (like tables) cannot be changed while the view exists.

2025-06-29

If you ever have long scripts in SQL Server Management Studio and need to refer to a particular line, it can be helpful to have line numbers shown. This is even more useful if you ever need to write a set of instructions for someone on how to modify a query, or if you are trying to describe how a query works.

Instead of having a query like this:

2025-06-28

I recently read another Mandarin Companion book called Great Expectations Part 1 adapted by John Pasden from the Charles Dickens original book.

I love these books.

John Pasden is well-known to anyone who’s been learning Mandarin for any length of time. He was one of the presenters at ChinesePod over the years. He set up a company called Mandarin Companion that produces graded readers.

If you haven’t seen graded readers (in any language), they are reading books that limit the scope of the target language to a particular set of words (or in this case characters).

2025-06-27

One feature that many developers have been asking the SSMS team for, is the ability to use a dark mode.

Instead of a screen that looks like this: