AI sounds like someone, which is exactly why the checking stops. Cardinal read the cover of my book and has not recovered.
Text to SQL: The SQL Was Never the Hard Part
Text to SQL works now, on real schemas, with joins and window functions. I watched three companies hand it to their business users, and all three quietly stopped. The SQL was never the hard part. The hard part is knowing which table is real and which meaning of the word you meant.
Tokens and the Context Window: Out of the Window, Out of Mind
Part two of ten. Most of the surprises people hit with AI at work trace back to this one chapter. A model reads in tokens, holds only so many at once, and charges for each one. 1. What is a token? A token is the unit of text a model…
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The Migration of a Row: Tagged, Followed, Found Again
I followed the migration of a row through SQL Server 2025, from the first write to the grave. The log gets there before the table. The delete does not erase anything. And when the table is empty and the ghost is gone, the statistics histogram still names the row in full.
Holiday Change Freeze Checklist for SQL Server: What to Verify First
Use a change freeze checklist for SQL Server to verify backups, integrity checks, disk headroom, Agent jobs, and serious errors.
Turning a Business Question Into a Query: Define the Metric First
Turn a business question into a tested T-SQL metric with explicit time zones, cancellations, returns, and a hand-checked sample.
Blocking Alert: A T-SQL Check for Sessions Blocked Too Long
Short blocking is normal. This check flags lock waits past a threshold and walks each chain to the session at the front of the line.