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…
Lock Escalation, and Why You Shouldn’t Disable It!
Lock escalation affects every SQL Server database. Understanding when and why SQL Server escalates row-level locks to table locks and what you can do about it is essential knowledge for any DBA managing concurrent workloads.