SqlPackage, Synonyms, and the Third-Party Database Problem
You’ve got a SQL Server database that talks to a third-party database via synonyms. The third-party vendor lets customers customize their schema. The table names differ across environments. You use SSDT and SqlPackage for deployments….
ADO Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means
You’re in a meeting. Someone says “ADO.” Your brain — conditioned by 20+ years of muscle memory — immediately conjures up connection strings, recordsets, and ADODB.Connection. Then you realize they’re talking about a CI/CD pipeline….
Database Seeding: When to Hit the Table vs. When to Hit the API
You’ve got a new environment to stand up. Maybe it’s a fresh QA instance, maybe it’s a training environment someone just spun up, or maybe production got rebuilt after a disaster recovery test. Either way,…
Diplomacy Is a Feature, Not a Bug
I was reviewing some data export files the other day when a colleague flagged a problem. One of the rows in a CSV file was misaligned — columns shifted, extra fields appearing where they shouldn’t….
Pick a Convention and Stick With It
You know what’s worse than a bad naming convention? Two naming conventions in the same database. I ran into this last week while writing a verification query for a PostgreSQL database. The query is a…
Teaching Your AI Assistant to Remember: Session Checkpoints for Multi-Day Work
If you’ve used an AI coding assistant for anything beyond a quick one-off question, you’ve hit the wall: the conversation context runs out. You start a new session, and the assistant has no idea what…