Blogs

Career Navigation in the Time of Tech Layoffs

Career Navigation in the Time of Tech Layoffs

By Kendra Little on May 23, 2023 • 5 min read

Reorganizations and layoffs are now commonplace in the tech industry: a daily occurrence. It’s increasingly necessary for tech workers mentally prepare for potential job loss and uncertainties that arise. It’s a common antipattern to believe that it’s “too late” to prepare for a layoff or unexpected reorganization if a layoff has already occurred in your organization.

It’s never too late, and it’s always the right time these days to start mentally preparing yourself for change– because there’s reliably another change around the corner.

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ChatGPT Says SSMS Is the Best SQL Server Monitoring Tool

ChatGPT Says SSMS Is the Best SQL Server Monitoring Tool

One thing I enjoy about AI chatbots is that they can help me recognize when I’ve missed something obvious.

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Use ChatGPT to See Multiple Perspectives: An Example With ORMs and Database Code

Use ChatGPT to See Multiple Perspectives: An Example With ORMs and Database Code

There’s a lot of hype, concern, and fear regarding generative AI lately. Tools like ChatGPT are so good at generating groups of words that it feels like magic– however, generative AI doesn’t have the ability to understand or verify the language it generates. For example, it’s been used to write news stories for CNET – but sometimes included facts that are just plain wrong.

One positive use case of a generative AI tool like ChatGPT is to ask it to make a case for different perspectives than your own, and use this as a starting point to broaden your understanding – with the knowledge that we need to verify everything ChatGPT tells us. As an example, let’s chat to ChatGPT about Object Relational Mapping tools (ORMs).

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3 Lessons Learned About Azure SQL Database

3 Lessons Learned About Azure SQL Database

By Kendra Little on January 15, 2023 • 4 min read

Category: azure-sql

Hosted cloud databases make a lot of administrative tasks easier, or take care of them for you altogether.

But here are three things that I’ve found a little too easy to forget about Azure SQL Database.

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New Article on Performance Tuning with the Missing Indexes Feature in SQL Server

New Article on Performance Tuning with the Missing Indexes Feature in SQL Server

We’ve just published a new article in the SQL docs, Tune nonclustered indexes with missing index suggestions . The article explains what the missing index feature is, limitations of the feature, and how to use missing index DMVs and missing index suggestions in Query Store to tune indexes.

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Find Query Execution Timeouts with Query Store

Find Query Execution Timeouts with Query Store

During a discussion of troubleshooting query timeouts in Azure SQL Database recently, I wondered: can you find queries that timed out in Query Store?

You can.

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Index Design Guide Updated: Index Types, B+ Trees, and Row Locators, Oh My

Index Design Guide Updated: Index Types, B+ Trees, and Row Locators, Oh My

We’ve recently updated the SQL Server and Azure SQL index architecture and design guide. This article is an in-depth guide to indexing in databases using the SQL Server engine, including SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure Synapse Analytics.

Our recent update adds a table to categorize the types of indexes discussed in the article, clarifies B-trees vs B+ trees, and describes how row locators (aka “secret columns”) are used in nonclustered indexes.

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