The Bit Bucket

I was intrigued to see a book called Don’t Give Your Work Away for Free by Thaddeus Cooper and Dr Frederick Von Greensburg. I thought I should check it out.

The authors start out by discussing how employment typically works today. You have a timeline to do work, you go there for the time, and you are paid for going there.

While I have done that sort of work over the years, it’s certainly not how I prefer to work. I far prefer a project value basis where I determine with the client what needs to be done, work out the value that it will provide, and provide them with a price to achieve that outcome. How and when I get that done is then up to me.

2025-06-23

Code quality has always been an important topic ever since coding began. Code complexity is an important part of this. One of the topics that came up many years ago was a discussion on what length procedures or functions should be, before they became too difficult to follow.

I remember one guy commenting that he thought as soon as all the code didn’t fit on your screen any more, you were much more likely to have bugs in it. At the time, screens weren’t all that big.

2025-06-22

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: Administration Level: Medium

Question:

The CPU of a SQL Server is at 2%. Very little I/O is happening.

A query has been running for a long time, and seems stuck i.e., doesn’t seem to be doing anything, what’s likely to be the issue?

2025-06-21

SSMS is a great tool and it has lots of helpful menu items and toolbar items. Unfortunately, all these items take up screen real estate.

Even though you can get more screen real estate for editing, by unpinning the windows on each side, you can see that the default screen layout could be considered a bit cluttered if you really just want to focus on the particular query that you’re working on.

2025-06-20

A few days ago, I wrote about the new Standard Developer Edition of SQL Server 2025 and what good news it was. I noted that the need for it had reduced since SQL Server 2016 SP1 but it was still helpful.

While the product group management did a good job with SQL Server 2016 SP1, others in the product group don’t seem to have remembered those lessons. The team keeps releasing features that only work on particular SKUs of Azure SQL Database.

2025-06-19

Years ago, I had the privilege of presenting “what’s new in SQL Server” sessions at many locations around the world. When presenting sessions, you can sometimes learn as much as you teach. What I learned while delivering those sessions is that the product group sees what’s important in a release very differently to what the attendees do.

Each time there’s a new version of SQL Server, there will normally be three or four marketing pillars (groups of functionality), and each will have about eight to ten bullet points.

2025-06-18

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: Intro

Question:

You are writing Azure SQL Database code that needs to concatenate strings.

You have previously used the + operator to do this.

Which other operator can be used for concatenating strings?

Answer:

Azure SQL Database supports the double-pipe || operator for string concatenation.

2025-06-17

In another section, I’ve described ways to configure the scroll bar in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). There is another key option that I haven’t discussed previously: map mode. By default, the scroll bar shows the changes, syntax errors, etc:

If you have a long script though, it can be hard to visualize what’s in the other parts of the script. Map mode can help with this.

Right-click the scroll bar and choose Scroll Bar Options:

2025-06-16

If you’ve installed the public preview of SQL Server 2025, you will have noticed that the list of free editions that you can install, has increased.

Instead of just Evaluation, Developer, and Express, the list is now as shown above, with Developer split into Standard Developer and Enterprise Developer.

While the naming of the new editions sound like they are describing the person using them, they are about the included features.

2025-06-15

In an earlier post, I described how I didn’t particularly like all the colors that are shown in the scroll bar now in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS):