General

On June 15-16, I’ll be participating in @MS Tech Summit 2026! Each year, @MSTechSummit is a great event.

Join me for my session How AI Features Improve Search in SQL Server 2025 , where I’ll be discussing how the addition of AI-based capabilities in SQL Server has changed the game for search.

Use the code MSTS26SP20 to get 20% off Standard or Exec passes.

See you at DSS!

Find more details about the event here: https://ml.dssconf.pl/en/

2026-05-12

I was wondering today how often EULAs (end user license agreements) get tested in courts, and in particular, EULAs that appear in consumer-grade applications.

While most sound quite official, it’s hard to imagine most of them being very enforceable. Does anyone EVER read them?

Fair Cop !

I was amused a few years back when I was installing an application, clicked over the EULA and the application said “how could you possibly have read that in 1.076 seconds?”. Yep, got me there; that’s a fair cop.

2026-05-02

I was doing some varied reading this morning and stumbled across an article by Paul Graham. I want to highlight this passage:

We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia may be the most famous. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it’s good enough. And it’s free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can’t link to them. They’re not part of the conversation.

2026-04-28

A while back, I wrote about my experiences with trying to see if ChatGPT could answer questions as though it was a baseball umpire. It did quite poorly, and I came to the conclusion that the problem was what it learned from. Curiously, it got hard questions correct and easy questions wrong. It seemed to me that people who knew what they were talking about were the only ones to ever discuss the hard questions, while everyone had an opinion (often wrong) about the easy questions.

2026-04-26

A while back, I managed to catch the tail end of the reptiles series that Sir David Attenborough created. If you have a spare 3 1/2 minutes, take a look at the end of his Life in Cold Blood series episode about crocodiles.

People seem to think crocodiles are cold, unintelligent eating machines. I have a major respect for them. They’ve been around since the time of the dinosaurs, and anything that can do that, is doing something right. In fact, until we arrived with guns, etc. they really didn’t have much to worry about. They were a top-level predator.

2026-04-20

One of my pet dislikes in this industry is the way we handle passwords. I’ve thought that, as a concept, they are completely broken and have been for a long time.

We tell users:

• Pick something really complex
• Don’t write it down
• Change it regularly
• Use a different password for each site, and often for each role that you hold in each site
• Deal with the fact that we apply different rules for passwords on each site

etc, etc.

2026-04-16

Whenever we’re talking about an amount of data, it’s important to understand the units that are used. In all the early days of computing, it all seemed pretty simple. We had KB for 1024 bytes, MB for 1024 * 1024 bytes, etc.

The first people I saw messing that up were the hard drive manufacturers. Originally, they followed the standard units that we had been using in computing. But somewhere along the way, they changed how this worked. The vendors decided that if they had 10,000,000 bytes of storage, they would call that a 10MB hard drive, but of course it wasn’t, at least not in how we used to measure them. Some of the vendors even started talking about hard drive megabytes like it was some other new unit. That meant that suddenly a 128MB hard drive (128 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 or 137,438,953,472 bytes) became a 137MB hard drive.

2026-03-25

I was part of a discussion the other day where the topic was the most misleading error message you’ve ever seen. I’ve been in the industry long enough that it’s a pretty tall list of error messages that I need to consider.

The winner for me

But I finally decided on one:

Back in the VB6 days, there was a common error message that said Out of Memory.

There were many issues that could lead to that error message, but running out of memory was probably the least likely.

2026-03-23

Over the years, I’ve seen so many discussions regarding the certification process and exams. I’ve seen posts from many people that are very experienced with products saying they can’t see any point in the certification exams and also argue that competencies in the Microsoft Partner program shouldn’t be based on exams. They feel these people should somehow just be recognised for their other contributions.

Grandfathering

Regarding the certification process, I don’t agree that anyone should be just grandfathered in. Any of the people that have a great deal of knowledge and experience really should be able to just take the exams and be done with it.

2026-03-17

Something I really struggle with in this industry is when newcomers to a system want to change standards within existing systems because they think something else is better. It’s a sign of immaturity yet it often applies to people who should be senior. Many system architects fall into this category.

What’s in a PK name?

For example, a vendor system that I’ve been working with has single column primary keys in all tables, and all the primary key columns are named PKey_ID (I’ve changed it a bit to protect the guilty). Now I can’t say I like that naming at all, but that’s not the point. There are a large number of tables that already have that naming scheme.

2026-03-15