Hocine Mechara

SQL Server Always On Availability Groups and Database Master Keys: A Hidden Failover Pitfall

I recently came across an interesting case involving a client whose application used SQL Server symmetric keys to encrypt sensitive data. The database was hosted in an Always On Availability Group environment for high-availability and disaster-recovery. The interesting(…)

SQL-Server 2025: Building a RAG Shopping Assistant with T-SQL

In this post, we continue our AI journey with SQL Server 2025 (Preview). In previous articles, I already showed how to call the GPT-4o chat-completion model in Azure directly from SQL Server to generate product descriptions, how to create and(…)

SQL-Server 2025: Vector Indexes & Semantic Search Performance

When performing search operations on large datasets, performance is a key consideration for ensuring that an application remains efficient and user-friendly. This consideration equally applies when working with embedded data. That’s why in this blog post we’ll explore the different(…)

SQL-Server 2025: Generate Data Embeddings for Semantic Search

In this Blog we will continue with our AI journey in SQL-Server 2025 preview. If you didn’t read the first Blog you’ll find it here: dbi Blog  In this article, we will explore the concept of data embeddings, a(…)

SQL Server 2025: Where Data Meets Intelligence

The evolution of AI is booming and brings many new possibilities to enhance efficiency and convenience with many different use cases. While AI chatbots have had an almost revolutionary influence in recent years, we are now entering the next(…)

Exploring the Future of Data at SQLBits 2025 in London

I’m looking back on three amazing days of interesting technical insights from the SQLBits event 2025 in London. It’s actually my first time having the pleasure of attending one of Europe’s biggest data platform events and I can sincerely(…)

Set SQL Server Trace Flags Automatically and Smoothly

Managing SQL Server trace flags effectively is a common task for DBAs and system engineers, especially when tuning the SQL Server behavior for specific use cases or performance optimizations. While trace flags can be enabled programmatically using T-SQL commands(…)

Automate your Deployments in Azure with Terraform!

Terraform is a strong open-source declarative and platform agnostic infrastructure as code (IaC) tool developed by HashiCorp. It facilitates the deployment and whole management of infrastructure. In this hands on blog I will show you how you can use(…)

Understanding Head Blockers in SQL-Server

A customer of mine had a recurring issue with one of his business critical applications where everything was frozen and stuck for the users. The issue was caused due to a head blocking transaction which increased blocking in the(…)

Keep an eye on your SQL Agent jobs using T-SQL!

Introduction: A couple of weeks ago I had a customer who was interested in monitoring the duration of some of his SQL-Agent jobs. The jobs were running in a data warehouse environment and were executing some ETL processes for(…)