The SQL Advisor answers seven letters with measurements instead of opinions. Table variables, what each index costs on insert, shrinking after a big delete, SELECT star, ORDER BY in a view, heaps, and whether the order of your WHERE predicates matters.
Tribal Knowledge: Nobody Left to Ask
Tribal knowledge is the part of the job nobody writes down, and it leaves when the person leaves. I sat with a team that could not tell me whether they were allowed to change four lines of billing code. The assistant at the end of the table had read every line and could not say why those lines were there.
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.
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.
Normalisation in Plain Words, and When to Stop
Understand normalisation through one order example, then decide when a reporting copy is worth the cost of keeping duplicated data consistent.
SQL to MongoDB: Mapping SELECT, WHERE, GROUP BY and JOIN
Moving from SQL to MongoDB is mostly a change of vocabulary plus a new way to join. This post maps SELECT, WHERE, ORDER BY, GROUP BY and JOIN to find, sort, $group and $lookup, and tests each one on a small vegetarian shop.