The Bit Bucket

When we talk about protocols for sending and receiving streams of event data, two of the most common you’ll come across are HTTP and AMQP.

HTTP

HTTP is the workhorse of the web. It’s everywhere, it’s simple, and it’s supported by almost every platform and device. The model is request/response: the client asks for something, the server replies, and then the connection is done. HTTP is stateless, meaning every request is independent. That simplicity makes it easy to use, but it also makes it less suitable for continuous, real-time data flows. If you want to stream updates constantly, you either have to keep making new HTTP requests or hold the connection open in ways that HTTP wasn’t originally designed for.

2026-02-08

A while back, I got an interesting reply to a blog entry about LINQ and Entity Framework terminology. The reader asked if I’d worked with the Progress DBMS.

I have.

Here are my thoughts on it. Obviously others will have a different view of history but I mention Progress over and over again when I’m teaching classes as three examples related to them really hit home for me.

Background

I worked with Progress for many years, starting in about 1983 through to some time in the late 1990’s.

2026-02-07

Azure IoT Hub is a specialized service designed specifically for connecting and managing IoT devices at scale. While Azure Event Hubs is a general-purpose streaming service, IoT Hub focuses on the unique challenges that come with millions of devices out in the real world.

First and foremost, IoT Hub provides secure, reliable connections for those devices. In an IoT deployment, you might have sensors, machines, or even entire fleets of vehicles sending telemetry data up to the cloud. IoT Hub can support millions of devices connecting simultaneously, each streaming their data in real time.

2026-02-06

Crocodiles fascinate me. They’ve been around since the dinosaurs, and until we came along and made weapons, they were a top-tier predator.

Recently I watched the end of a wonderful documentary from the BBC called Dragons Alive . Although my wife didn’t really want to discuss it at 12:30am, it really got me thinking about the nature of curiosity and its importance in how we advance science and through it, society.

2026-02-05

Azure Event Hubs is Microsoft’s fully managed event streaming service. If you’re familiar with Apache Kafka, you can think of Event Hubs as Microsoft’s cloud-native equivalent. It’s designed to handle extremely high volumes of events — we’re talking about millions of events per second — all without you having to stand up and manage complex clusters yourself.

One of the most important features of Event Hubs is that it offers Kafka-compatible endpoint. That means if you already have applications, tools, or client libraries that were built to talk to Kafka, in many cases they can connect to Event Hubs with little or no modification. That’s a huge benefit because it reduces friction for teams migrating workloads into Azure or building hybrid architectures.

2026-02-04

One of my favorite DMFs that most people seem to be completely unaware of, is sys.dm_fts_parser(). It allows you to see the result of the word-breaking occurring within full text search. If you execute the query:

SELECT * 
FROM sys.dm_fts_parser('"Hello Greg. How are you? I haven''t seen you for a while."', 1033, 0, 0);

It returns the following data (along with some other columns):

That’s really impressive as it lets you parse text into words. The 1033 was the locale I chose (for US English) and the other two parameters were a stop word list (formerly called a noise word list) and whether or not it should be accent sensitive.

2026-02-03

Let’s talk about message brokers and event streams — these are the backbone technologies that make real-time systems work at scale.

At the simplest level, a message broker acts as a middleman between the systems producing events and the systems consuming them. Instead of producers and consumers being tightly coupled — where the producer has to know exactly where to send data and the consumer has to be available at the exact right moment — the broker sits in between and handles that communication.

2026-02-02

Encryption in SQL Server is often discussed as a checklist item:

• Is the database encrypted?
• Do we need Always Encrypted?
• What does compliance require?

What gets discussed far less often is how these features behave in real systems, what problems they actually solve, and what trade-offs they introduce.

This post looks at Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and Always Encrypted from a practical standpoint: what each one protects, what it doesn’t, and how to decide which one belongs in your design.

2026-02-01

Most of the systems we’ve worked with historically are request-driven. In this model, a client asks for information and the server provides it. Think about browsing a website: you type in a URL, your browser requests the page, and the server responds with the content. That’s a pull model — the client decides when it wants data. It’s predictable, it’s synchronous, and it’s been the backbone of web applications for decades.

2026-01-31

The Service Master Key (SMK) is one of the most misunderstood security components in SQL Server.

It is frequently described as:

• The root of all encryption
• The key that protects everything
• Something you must back up constantly

Those statements are not entirely wrong - but they are incomplete, and in some cases actively misleading.

It’s important to understand what the Service Master Key actually does, when it matters, when it doesn’t, and why many operational decisions around it are based on myth rather than mechanics.

2026-01-30