Whether you're a Prime Day shopper, or prefer not to shop at Amazon, there are deals on my book SQL for Data Scientists today! Amazon Prime Day amzn.to/4xOjn32 Free Shipping at Bookshop bookshop.org/a/55056/9781...

I need to move to Tromso. It’s currently 22 degrees cooler than it is here.

Molly is deeply unimpressed at how warm it is. Mind you so am I and I’m not wearing a fur coat.

#caturday extra snoozes today. Apparently it’s been a tough week.

Our next event is on 2nd July with @andycutler.bsky.social presenting My Dopamine Has Gone Missing: A Tale of Frustration & Enlightenment. and Steve Powell @azuredatafool.bsky.social presenting Change Event Streaming: Great feature lousy documentation. Please see www.meetup.com/mcrdataplatf...

Dylan, on life in your 80’s, is incredible. @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/o...

The Big Questionᵀᴹ flooding my social media is "What do we do about the downstream bottlenecks that AI's making much worse?" Suggested solutions range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Let's get the LLM to do it. LOL. Let's just skip review. Sheesh! We've known the real solution for decades...

I did 2 episodes of “For all mankind” and lost interest a while back. Was probably busy with a work thing. Have picked it back up and am now hooked. Am bingeing the entire first season and it’s amazingly good.

Great time at PASS Summit Europe- keynote complete!

Want your cat to be as relaxed and comfy as this? Of course you do. Then buy your cat sofa here >>> craftysharp.etsy.com

Early flight. So doing airport bingo. Already got raucous hen party. Someone with a wheel missing off their suitcase and entitled boomers creating chaos in security. Let’s see if we can fill the card…

A broken query that still runs successfully? 🤔 Joe’s latest Frog Blog explores a fascinating Synapse behaviour where a failing CAST never actually executes because Spark quietly prunes the unused column from the query plan👇

Farage parody account puts Reform UK leader to the sword!

SqlServer.Rules v5.0.0 is now available! An open-source static code analysis library and toolset for SQL Server database projects, command line, and Visual Studio, that helps teams catch design flaws, naming inconsistencies, performance anti-patterns, and risky T-SQL constructs

If anything else on this damned car breaks I am going to take a sledgehammer and an industrial SDS and get medieval on its ass.

I just published a new update to the #SQLServer Execution Plan Reference. I added a page, with the description of the Population Query "operator". I also updated and improved many existing pages, detailed on the Change Log page. sqlserverfast.com/epr/populati... sqlserverfast.com/epr/change-l...

A morning stroll in the intermittent sunshine

Power BI semantic model memory errors, part 5: the "maximum allowable memory allocation" error blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2026/05/10/p...

We seem to have acquired a couple of pet ducks. They seem to come and sleep on our patio each evening.

I feel my wife has prepared more effectively for the holiday

Well that’s pretty grim. Reform are clearing the board in our local council elections. 40-50% across all the wards. Labour pretty much wiped out. This does not bode well for the next GE

In a popular courtyard in Kyiv. I saw this little figure. The Voices of Children Foundation and the 🇺🇦 band Hyphen Dash launched a charity initiative to draw attention to children affected by the war and raise funds for them. I’ll share a link to read more and support the initiative.

Back home from #sqlbits. There are other Microsoft data conferences but, after 20 years of attending, none of the others have had anything like the same impact on my life and my career. This year it was better than ever. As always, thanks to the organisers, helpers, speakers and sponsors!

Thank to everyone involved in #SQLBits2026 another amazing event.

I had entirely forgotten about the predatory seagulls that patrol Cardiff city centre. Saw two food related muggings and was only walking around for a couple of hours in the sunshine.

Is it the first sunny week of the year? It must be #SQLBits2026 week…

Mrs Fool made the boy a birthday cake. I can only lay claim to helping with the washing up on this one. There are even some curly wurly bits on it. Looking forward to a slice later with a cuppa

After Gartner®, FABCON & MVP Summit, one thing is clear: The conversation has shifted. From dashboards ➡️ to risk, trust & scale. Join our executive briefings on Apr 15 & Jun 3 👉 Register: pbis.cc/eventbrite

The best bit of the day is sitting listening to a podcast savouring my first mug of coffee with the cat collecting the cat fuss tax that is due. I will have to turn the laptop on shortly but not right now.

Just watching last nights episode of The Assembly and been reminded that now and again some TV is still worth watching.

“And if you think you’ve somehow escaped, then you probably haven’t thought this one through. We are living in a world increasingly of Trump’s making. And it isn’t going to end well.” Many a true word said in jest www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Here’s this week’s Better Offline. I talk to @paulkedrosky.com about the large amount of speculative data center land purchases, the brittle NVIDIA GPU economy, and the economic realities of AI. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b... Linktr.ee/betteroffline

Molly is exhausted from all the extra napping involved in her long weekend. #caturday

I am genuinely sorry I kept posting constantly about new services and features all the time… www.serverlesssql.com/attention-sp...

Not sure my attempts to kill the raspberry canes have succeeded. They were being relocated.

I may be working on a Sunday evening but I am doing it with a certain amount of style now the complicated stuff is done.

A reminder to all my friends across the UK that British Summertime starts tonight at 1am so don’t forget to put your clocks forward an hour and get your snow shovels ready!

Today’s efforts will be powered by obscene quantities of coffee, excessive amounts of Apollo 440 and a smattering of B52s

That feeling when the reminder for your first meeting (of many) pops up in the middle of a run of great songs on your playlist and you know you’re never gonna get back into the flow and the next few songs are going to be chopped up into short bursts or possibly abandoned altogether. 😕

Documenting The Sentinel is really growing my collection of disassemblies at bbcelite.com Five projects: Elite, Aviator, Revs, Lander, The Sentinel 1,038,891 words of source code commentary 507,016 words of deep dives All Shakespeare's plays? 835,997 words #retrocomputing #bbcmicro #c64 #8bit

My new vlog is live. Recorded in the hospital, so not the usual camera and sound quality. But as long as I am able to create and share content, I will! sqlserverfast.com/blog/hugo/20...

Oh there are some people at work that are going to be in real trouble now…

Happy Friday! Today is probably a good day to patch your SQL Servers.

Yes, hello, is that God? Yeah, hi. I have a complaint. You gave me this brain that’s designed for finding berries and avoiding lions and now people are ‘just circling back’ to see if we can ‘move the needle’ on ‘key initiatives’? NONE of those things are berries.

My BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Iain M. Banks' The State of the Art can now be found and played here: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Waiting for my train home & a very sleek modern triplet of carriages pulls up. Is that for xxxxxx says the bloke next to me. The lass next to me sniggers “it can’t be cos it’s too posh”. 5 mins later 2 carriages at least 20 years older than the shiny ones pulls in. That’ll be our train then.

Well this is a grim read this morning. Your phone is not your friend. Entire generations have been scarred by unregulated social media. I do wonder what the internet will look like 20 years from now. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...