SQL Server Central

In all recent versions of the database you can call DBMS_UTILITY.EXPAND_SQL_TEXT to get the “true” version of a SQL that the database will run. It takes your SQL as input and returns a CLOB, which means its all a bit fiddly if you have a SQL statement already sitting in your SQLcl/SQLPlus buffer. Using a trick borrowed from Tanel Poder’s pr script, here is a wrapper that makes it much simpler. Save this as expand.sql (or grab it from my git repo https://github.com/connormcd/misc-scripts) .

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) does not solve AI hallucinations. Instead, it just moves the failure point from the language model to the retrieval pipeline — where poor chunking, weak embeddings, outdated documents, and low-confidence search results quietly produce confident but incorrect answers.

Users are getting addicted to generative AIand want to do everything through it. One of these days one of my users asked me if he could use Claude Desktop to access our ERP data instead of opening the application and navigating to the info he needed. Do I think it's wrong? No, I don’t. It’s my job as the IT Guy to make users as happy as possible (terms apply) and that’s what I did. I built a quick and rough MCP that allows Claude Desktop to read info from my SQL Server database.

A little Christmas fun for you using the spatial features in SQL Server and SSMS. (4) Log in or register to rate You rated this post out of 5. Change rating 4,280 reads Discuss More spatial fun, this time for Easter. Log in or register to rate You rated this post out of 5. Change rating 736 reads Discuss Last time we turned SQL Server into a Christmas tree. Every year around St Patrick's Day I find myself doing something I can't fully justify.

By way of background, a while back I did video called “My New Favourite Join” on the LATERAL clause. The reason I like it is that it lets you solve a problem by composing little pieces together rather than writing one enormous query. Now this post is not about LATERAL, but I’ll show a quick LATERAL example to show how it leads to a cool new 26ai SQL enhancement. I’ll start with a simple example.

One of the things I’ve been requesting for a number of years is cost information. I could see this coming in 2015 with the move to the cloud and need to justify the resources provisioned along with sizes. Doing that effectively needs cost information. Redgate Monitor has added a bit of cost information, and the virtual machine section in the Estate tab contains this. This post looks at what is available (as of June 2026). This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor.

I type fairly well. Well, I type fast, but I do wear out a backspace key relatively quickly on most keyboards. That and a space bar. AI helps me deal with my issues in a way that I really like. This post looks at a small thing that I appreciate, and it’s why I wish I had a small local model running for more software. This is part of a series of experiments with AI systems. Searching for Posts Today I was searching for some posts. I typed in something and found nothing.

Finance saw the issue before the pipeline did At 07:18, finance sent a short message: “Yesterday’s vendor settlement is almost double. Can you check before the cash review?” That was not a Snowflake health question. The task had completed, COPY had loaded rows, no records were rejected, and the dashboard refreshed before 08:00. From a platform point of view, the pipeline looked normal. From finance’s point of view, the number was wrong, and that was the only thing that mattered.

Problem I have a 2-node failover cluster instance running on Windows Server 2019 Standard edition. I have a requirement to add a new SAN disk to the SQL Server failover cluster instance (FCI), and then I need to move a user database to that newly added shared disk. Can you show the steps required to add a new disk to the FCI and move the user database? Solution In my client’s SQL Server environment, one of the databases grows very rapidly because of the high number of transactions.

I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but I’d like to apply the Goldilocks principle to a database object-namely, a materialized view. You might be thinking, how does that apply to database objects when it comes to things like not too cold, not too hot, or not too heavy, not too light? But bear with me (no pun intended) and we’ll see how all this pans out shortly. Just about every web application has a public page.