• Planning for Change

    Over the last year, I’ve been asked numerous times when I’m plan to retire. This question has come from friends, parents of kids I coach, coworkers at Redgate, and even from Microsoft. A few people have asked about my succession plans for leaving, as I have a public site at SQL Server Central, and the charity in SQL Saturday. I’d like those things to continue past my time, so I am thinking about how to do that.…


  • Great Things

    “Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” – Vincent van Gogh, Dutch Post-Impressionist Painter. I ran across this quote recently and it struck me that it’s expresses a thought I’ve had for some time. Instant, magical success isn’t often what it appears. Anyone that seems to have sprung up overnight with success in anything has often spent a lot of time getting ready. Outside of lottery winners, of course. If you bought…


  • Cleaning Up Azure MS Defender Billing

    I have a few Azure subscriptions, which are fairly small and not used that often. Mainly I do some SQL Server or Azure SQL experimentation. Sometimes I might create another resource, but I try to not waste resources and disable them quickly (or drop them) when I’m done. However. I hadn’t done much in the last couple of months on Azure. For some reason, I decided to check my bill. What I found was that there were…


  • PostgreSQL 19 Is Late

    “All software contains bugs.” That’s a quote from Robert Haas’s “Postgres 19 is late” post. He goes on to say that PostgreSQL has lots of bugs in it. It’s the way it’s been for a codebase that’s over 40 years old. He goes on to note that it’s easier to find bugs with LLMs, and easier to fix them. It’s not, however, as easy to do the latter as the former. The impact on PostgreSQL 19 is…


  • A Heavy Heart

    Hugo, I have many memories of moments we spent together, discussing data, career, life, and family. Three stand out, though not more or less important than any others. I can remember asking you a question years ago at a SQL Saturday about the way an execution plan was formed, and you patiently explaining to me something I didn’t understand. I’m sure I asked some poor questions, but you tried your best to help me understand some aspect…