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The Wide World of GiST Indexes
In Parts I (Solving the Overlap Query Problem in PostgreSQL) and II (Overlapping Ranges in Subsets in PostgreSQL) of this series, we used the GiST index type – and its lesser known cousin: SP-GiST –...
View ArticleFabric: Query a SQL Endpoint from a Notebook
Let’s analyse why we would like to query an SQL Endpoint. Once we understand why, we can dig into how to make a query to a SQL Endpoint. We use notebooks to connect directly to lakehouse. Except by the...
View ArticleThe CREATE DOMAIN Statement
One of the least known, least used features of SQL is the CREATE DOMAIN statement. It does not exist in SQL Server as of SQL Server 2022, but it has been a part of PostgreSQL since 7.3. Some...
View ArticleLoad Data into Snowflake Using Python with Pandas
Loading data into Snowflake is a common need. Using Python and pandas is a common go-to solution for data professionals. Whether you’re pulling data from a relational database, wrangling a CSV file,...
View ArticleManaged Instance Gotchas – Error Conditions
I was recently on a project to migrate a very transactional installation of SQL Server to Azure SQL Managed Instance (MI). SQL Managed Instance is a good stepping stone between a full, on-prem SQL...
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Sponsoring SQL Saturday Richmond This Week
On April 5, 2025, Simple Talk will be a sponsor at SQL Saturday #1106 in Richmond Virginia. Having worked for a company in Virginia Beach for most of my career, Richmond’s events were always a regular...
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Fabric Database: Advanced Vector Search Features
A few weeks ago, I delivered some sessions about vector search in Fabric Databases and Azure SQL. Let’s talk about some advanced features available in both of them. Before analysing these advanced...
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Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) in PostgreSQL: Learning PostgreSQL...
It’s a tale as old as time. You want to read data. Your mate wants to write data. You’re stepping on each other’s toes, all the time. When we’re talking about relational data stores, one aspect that...
View ArticleData Quality: The Foundation for Business Agility and Growth
We live in a world awash with vast amounts of data. Today’s modern enterprises generate and rely on vast amounts of data every single day, but data is only as valuable as its quality. Organizations...
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Having no idea where to start
I think this is my favorite idea for a blog post, because the idea for this blog came about when I was brainstorming ideas, and had none. Nothing. I was staring at my monitor and my mind was blank....
View ArticleData Elements on a Nominal Scale
“On a scale from 1 to 10, what color is your favorite letter of the alphabet?” –Slogan on a T-shirt This is one of my favorite T-shirt gags because it teaches something about data types, scales and...
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Query Performance Analysis in Lakehouses
You may have already discovered the 4 special views the lakehouse has in the queryinsights schema to track query performance. I made a video about the lakehouse special tables, but since then, they...
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Working with MongoDB Shell
This article is part of Robert Sheldon's continuing series on Mongo DB. To see all of the items in the series, click here. Throughout this series, I’ve provided a number of examples of how to run...
View ArticleNew Series – Testing LLMs as Technical Editors
I spend a lot of editing articles from various authors about a wide variety of topics. I do my best to make sure everything that is posted to SimpleTalk.com is as correct as I can get it. All of my...
View ArticleOracle’s Limited Cloud Vendor Licensing
It’s nothing new for vendors to find ways to lock in customers to their products and cloud services. Oracle recently announced it will no longer support multi-tenancy in cloud deployments outside its...
View ArticleAnnouncing Database Frontiers: a Database Conference You Haven’t Yet Heard About
Database Frontiers is a new database conference hitting the spotlight come October 15th, 2025. Here’s everything you need to know. Preface It would be an educated guess that you spend a lot of time...
View ArticleLLM Technical Editor Test – ChatGPT with a VERY wrong article
As started in part 1 of this series, I have set out to test an LLMs ability to technical edit. For my first set of tests, I am using a pair of articles I created, filled with very bad advice. The...
View ArticleA Method for Managing Hierarchies in PostgreSQL
The Postgres database management system was originally designed as object-relational. We remind why PostgreSQL is an object-relational rather than just relational database management system, and...
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Introduction to GitHub Actions Part 2: GitHub-hosted runners
In the first article of this series, you learned how to set up a GitHub Actions Workflow in a GitHub repository. Like learning many languages and technologies, we started out with code that printed a...
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SQL Saturday Richmond Roundup
On the weekend of April 5, 2025, I attended (and Redgate sponsored) SQL Saturday Richmond. Having lived for 5 years in the Virginia Beach (and worked for a company there for 20 more), Richmond events...
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