I’ve just updated the production site with a couple of long overdue bug fixes and a few new features. Oh, and I finally migrated the service away from Mailchimp.

If you want more SQL Server content and less AI slop, please upvote some of my SQL Bits sessions. And if you need a little bribery to persuade you, I'll bring chocolates to my session if I get selected to speak. The good stuff, not the kind you get in the UK. 🇨🇭 sqlbits.com/sessions/ Thanks ❤️

You have about one week left to submit your abstracts to @datasatsto.se. Beautiful early-summer Stockholm awaits! sessionize.com/data-saturda...

If you can’t get users to adopt AI, just rename Office, and *voilà* - you instantly have hundreds of millions of AI subscribers. So much shareholder value. Chess, not checkers. Mind blown.

Mood

A wonderful event, 10/10 would recommend:

Another small step towards reducing my dependency on US cloud services: Today I cancelled my company's Dropbox plan and migrated all my files out. Grüetzi, Proton Drive 🇨🇭

After a long and miserable rainy December, snow has finally arrived in Stockholm.

The intro is so sarcastic that even Youtube’s AI summary can’t keep up.

I can't believe the winner of the FIFA Peace Prize would do this.

Stockholm subway cars have a couple of cool easter eggs, if you know where to look for them.

If your slop machine produces slop, I will call it slop.

Here are a couple of worthy candidates: 1.

Good bye 2025.

A month ago, I spent two hours building a production-grade solution for a client (a fringe requirement, not my core competency). Their team wants to build/understand/maintain the code from scratch themselves, which is perfectly understandable, but they are still discussing the design/architecture.

⚠️ I'm decommissioning dataplatform.social on March 31. ⚠️ Migrating your handle to another server (and bringing all your followers/followed handles) is relatively simple, but you have to do it while the server is still up. Information & migration instructions: dataplatform.social/@dhmacher/11...

Swedish Christmas tradition. If you know, you know.

All I want for Christmas is your session abstracts for @datasatsto.se I mean, technically before January 17th, but it would also make a really, really nice Christmas present. Just saying. 🎄

Enjoying the Christmas movie.

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

When I start to watch a Youtube video, but my neighbour decides to drill holes in their wall at 7 p.m. on a Sunday.

Pantone just updated their Color Of The Year

I finally made it as a tech entrepreneur! What's a reasonable valuation, chat?

Some day, when I grow up, I'm going to stop submitting talks to overseas conferences that publish their schedule without sending out rejection/waitlist emails first.

You want to learn about #SQLServer #partitioning, but don't have the attention span for an entire conference talk. Join me tomorrow, December 18, 19:00 CET (1 p.m. ET) for a retro-themed speedrun. Bring coffee, there won't be time to wait for stragglers. www.meetup.com/groningen-mi...

BLOG ALERT! arcticdba.se/posts/turbo-... Four months of LLM use = measurable brain decline. Like GPS destroyed spatial navigation, AI atrophies thinking. Let's talk about the research, warning signs, workplace implications, and practical solutions. #AI #Literacy #Cognition

Here's some #SSMS magic to lighten up your Monday. Maybe you already know about "block selection", where you hold down the Alt key while making a selection. But did you know that you can also remove line breaks using block selections?

I was just saved by the @callfordataspeakers.com procrastinator's digest, a weekly email that reminds you of calls for speakers that are about to close in the next few days. Including SQL Bits, in my case.

When you click that test button more than once

I guess it's fitting that it's a reimagined, worse version of someone else's artwork

DATE CHANGE for Data Saturday Stockholm 2026! Because of the Stockholm Marathon, which happens on the original date, not only were hotels exorbitantly expensive, but the venue was actually not even bookable. New date: May 9th. Of all the problems, it's never the stuff you'd expect. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

comma and period moves through youtube videos frame by frame 💞

Submit your crazy ideas for Data Saturday Stockholm on May 30th. it's the most beautiful time of year to go to the capital of Scandinavia, and It'll be worth your while.

BLOG ALERT! arcticdba.se/posts/turbo-... LLMs are pattern-matching engines, not thinking machines. But anthropomorphization plus dopamine-driven addiction pathways trick us into trusting them. Learn what they actually are and why understanding this matters. #AI #Literacy #Learning

Today I discovered to my great joy that Serverless Azure SQL Database instances now resume so quickly that you may not even notice it happening. Not even a timed-out connection attempt. Genuinely impressed and happy.

Want to guess how much time I spent trying to bulk insert a file from a blob store into Azure SQL using a managed identity before realizing that you _do_ need a database scoped credential? Spoiler, its: CREATE DATABASE SCOPED CREDENTIAL [💩] WITH IDENTITY = 'Managed Identity';

It’s Friday. Time to unpack your air drums.

Current status: "LLMs are dumb, but let's see what kind of damage I can do"

I don’t miss calls, I stare at them until they go away

Fine, ok, maybe self-driving cars are a good idea for some people. ”Who can even see those things, and then you hear a crunch, and you panic, and then you keep going” Good thing it was just a bollard and not a five-year-old, I guess.

LLMs are language-based, so they’re great for generating visions and mission statements, where accuracy is not important. Perfect for upper management, in other words. But useless for important work.

Somehow found myself on the Simple English Wikipedia entry for Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto, and more program notes should be like this tbh

The people who claim that some AI model is ”PhD-level” don’t have PhD degrees for a reason. It took an actual PhD friend just a single attempt, with a first-year exam question, to prove that LLMs are better at generating rocket emojis and bullet points than actually producing anything ”PhD-level”.

OMG lightning talks! I insta-submitted to new abstracts. You should too. (Although, please don't make them so good that mine get rejected.)

BLOG ALERT! www.arcticdba.se/posts/tooth-... Sugar went from luxury to ubiquitous poison before we understood what it was doing to us. We're doing the exact same thing with AI, adding it to everything without genuine use cases while it erodes literacy and critical thinking. #AI #Literacy

They pulled out my wisdom tooth, but I told them nothing.

”Solid move”

There are a _lot_ of #sqlfamily authors in this list. Apparently, if your book is in there, you could be entitled to compensation from Anthropic. secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/lookup/ I'd hate to see this "financially ruin" the AI industry. That would be just terrible.

SQL Server 2025 Is Out, and Standard Goes Up to 256GB RAM, 32 Cores! Today marks the official birthday of Microsoft SQL Server 2025. Here's where to download the evaluation version. Here are the top things you wanna consider as you talk to your managers, developers, and end users. The feature…