Voice of the DBA

  • Never is Not the Policy

    Years ago I worked with a few developers and DBAs that were temp-table happy. As in they defaulted to using temp tables everywhere. This was in SQL Server 6.5, and tempdb was an issue with contention, sizing, and performance. I rewrote so many queries to remove temp tables for our clients that I banned them. I told other developers they could never use temp tables in their SQL code. They, of course, would try to submit code…


  • Accessing the Data API Builder MCP Server from VS Code

    I recently started playing with the MCP Server for SQL Server, which is a part of the Data API Builder (DAB). I’m not sure why there wasn’t a separate piece of technology used, but I do think the DAB server is very useful, and I wish more people used it. Adding MCP to it makes some sense, as the REST and GRAPHQL endpoints can be disabled. This post will look at a few things I did to…


  • Republish: Going Big with SSDs

    Let’s look back. This editorial was originally published on Aug 16, 2011, when SSDs weren’t as common as they are now. Can you even buy hard drives? What do you think about the world 15 years later? I’m at the Fringe Festival with my wife today, so you get to re-read Going Big with SSDs.


  • A Worse Computer; A Better Car

    A few weeks ago, my wife and I purchased a Lucid Gravity for our second EV. We’ve owned a Tesla for almost five years, and it has been an amazing car. However, we decided that we spend a lot of time driving, and we wanted something a little more luxurious. The Tesla has a bit of a stiff ride, and it’s not quite as lush a car as some others EVs that have come out since we…


  • The Fringe Festival

    I was lucky enough to take a vacation a decade ago in Edinburgh with my wife. She came over to the UK with me for a quick trip. We had never been to Scotland together, so we trained up and stayed in Stirling. We walked around the area, visited the Wallace Monument and toured Edinburgh.  We hiked up Arthur’s Seat and piled stones on a sunny August afternoon. We hadn’t planned it, but the Edinburgh Fringe Festival…


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