I did not hand it a plan with a spill in it. Everybody can find a spill. I handed it a plan with no warnings at all, where every number on the screen looked healthy, and the query underneath was reading five million rows to return seventeen.
Y2K: The Work Behind “Nothing Happened”
Y2K did not end in worldwide disaster. Its repairs, failures, and recoveries show why, and what database teams can learn about proving maintenance matters.
Fermat Left a Note in a Margin. Other People Spent 358 Years Finishing It.
That note kept mathematicians busy for the next three and a half centuries. Let us talk about what Fermat left in a margine.
Every Database Has These Seven Tables
You can walk into any company on earth, open the production database, and find the same seven tables. Different industry, different continent, different decade. The same seven tables.
NOLOCK Can Miss Rows: The Order That Was Never Missing
A row can vanish from your report while it is sitting safely in the table the entire time. Nobody deleted it. Nothing rolled back. The read simply walked past it.
Everyone Expected AI to Come From the Big Companies
Everyone expected AI to come from the big companies. They had the money, the data, the researchers and a twenty year head start. The research came out of those labs. The products did not, and the reason has very little to do with talent or budget.
UPDATE Without WHERE Clause: The Day Everyone Got a Raise
An UPDATE without WHERE clause changed 8,432 salaries. When ROLLBACK can help, and how to check the affected row count before COMMIT.
Ten AI Phrases We Use Too Often
In 2013 I wrote a small list of phrases developers used too often. Twelve years later, the phrases have changed and the wincing has not. Here are ten I hear every week, and what each one usually means.
NOLOCK: Why It Counts Some Rows Twice and Misses Others
NOLOCK is not a safe performance fix, it is a decision to reduce blocking by accepting an answer that may never have been true. The whole problem is that nobody who types it thinks they are making that trade.
Tech Conferences: Five Questions About the Money
I said tech conferences are worth every hour and the sessions are not. Nobody argued about the sessions. They wrote about money instead, and five questions arrived.