The Bit Bucket

I’ve been continuing with my review of famous books. This time, I listed to the AudioBook of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway. It’s a very long time since I’d listened to this one, and I had forgotten quite a bit of it.

Author

According to Wikipedia, Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist who is known for having an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers. They also note that he has been romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle and outspoken, blunt public image. I can deal with that.

2026-10-21

A KQL Follower Database provides a way to share data across clusters or organizations while maintaining control and performance. Instead of duplicating ingestion pipelines or exporting data manually, a follower database automatically mirrors data from a leader database hosted in another KQL cluster.

This pattern is especially useful when multiple teams, regions, or tenants need access to the same data for analytics.

The follower maintains a read-only, synchronized view of the source. Updates to the leader are automatically reflected in the follower without any manual refresh or re-ingestion.

2026-10-20

Over the years, I’ve had a surprising number of questions on how to output all the data in a table as a series of INSERT statements. SQL Server Management Studio has had the ability to do this for a long time. Here’s an example.

In Object Explorer, I’ve expanded the WideWorldImporters database, then expanded Tables. Where people come unstuck is they right-click the table, and look at the scripting options:

2026-10-19

MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol designed for IoT and edge environments.

It uses a publish/subscribe model, making it efficient for devices that send small amounts of data over unreliable or bandwidth-limited connections - such as sensors, embedded devices, or mobile units.

In MQTT, a central broker (like Eclipse Mosquitto, HiveMQ, or EMQX) handles communication between clients. Devices publish messages to topics, and subscribers receive updates for the topics they’re interested in. This model decouples producers and consumers, improving scalability and resilience.

2026-10-18

Some years back, I decided to use a WordPress host for my blog because the time for me at sqlblog.com was coming to an end, community service was on its last legs, and WordPress seemed the obvious platform for a blog. Fellow MVP Adam Machanic made it really easy for me to migrate to a WordPress site with a tool that he had created. (Note: I’ve since moved to Azure Static Websites)

2026-10-17

Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a fully managed event ingestion and messaging system.

It supports large-scale, asynchronous communication between services. It is widely used for event-driven architectures, analytics pipelines, and IoT telemetry.

In this integration model, Pub/Sub acts as a cross-cloud source for Fabric. Messages published to topics in Google Cloud - such as application logs, telemetry events, or transaction data - can be exported or streamed into Fabric Eventstream for analysis.

2026-10-16

AI Ethics is a really timely subject. I recently read AI Ethics in Action: A practical guide to building modern organizations through purposeful, ethical AI innovation as a review copy I received from my friends at PackT.

Author

Laura Miller is described as a continental philosopher and AI ethicist. She works across many continents and is recognized by publications like The New York Times. Laura founded Aeterne and Mindher. I liked seeing that her advisory clients included NIST, the US State Department, and the EU AI Act Public Working Group. Laura is well-positioned to write this book.

2026-10-15

Spark Structured Streaming is part of Apache Spark’s ecosystem and is designed for continuous processing of data streams using a micro-batch model. Unlike true event-by-event streaming engines, Spark processes data in very small, frequent batches - giving it a balance between throughput and fault tolerance.

This approach makes Spark Structured Streaming especially effective for large-scale ETL and data transformation workloads. It can ingest data from a variety of real-time sources, perform complex operations such as joins, windowed aggregations, or enrichment, and then write the results to multiple destinations.

2026-10-14

Version 28 of our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs is now released and winging their way out to our SDU Insiders.

You can find details on the tools here .

If you haven’t been using SDU Tools yet, I’d suggest downloading them and taking a look. At the very least, it can help when you’re trying to work out how to code something in T-SQL.

This is a huge release of the tools.

2026-10-13

Apache Flink is a distributed stream processing framework designed for real-time analytics and event-driven applications. It’s well known for its ability to handle large volumes of continuous data with stateful computation, meaning it can maintain context across many events - something that simpler streaming systems struggle with.

A key strength of Flink is its support for Complex Event Processing (CEP).

CEP allows you to define and detect patterns of events rather than just single occurrences. For example, you could detect a sequence such as three failed login attempts followed by a successful one, or identify correlated sensor readings that indicate a developing fault.

2026-10-12