David Mellinger

To be honest, I am surprised I haven't seen this topic before. LinkedIn has skills that we are supposed to select to highlight our abilities, and I assume, so firms can find prospects with said abilities. The problem? Near duplicates. A great example: I am a SQL Server Professional, which means I am fully capable to create stored procedures using T-SQL. Within the skills lists you will find T-SQL, T-SQL Stored Procedures, SQL and a couple of others I don't remember. This is really annoying because in some cases we are restricted to only a few options. There are three or four associated to Visual Basic... I sincerely wish LinkedIn would clean up the skills list. It would help everyone. A lot. #LinkedIn

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Databricks just launched Genie Code and I'm really excited about this one!                           It's not another code completion tool, it's an autonomous AI agent that can reason through problems, plan multistep approaches, and execute full data and AI workflows end to end. The real superpower here? Unity Catalog. Having an AI coding agent that actually understands your data, the schemas, lineage, governance, business semantics, is what really separates this from other coding agents when it comes to complex data tasks. It's not just writing code in a vacuum, it knows your data. Talking with our Oil & Gas customers, I've seen firsthand how much this can seriously expedite data and ML workflows. Teams in this space are constantly stretched thin and dealing with massive, complex datasets. Having an AI partner that can actually plan and execute, not just suggest snippets, is a huge unlock.

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🧠 When working with multiple JOINs, choosing the base table is critical. Before writing complex SQL, I now ask: What should one row represent? Defining the grain first has helped me reduce duplication issues and logic errors in large queries. How do you decide your base table in complex joins? #SQL #DataAnalytics #AnalyticalThinking #DataModeling #BusinessIntelligence

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Every SQL developer knows this moment: The database is slow. Production is under pressure. And you're jumping between 10 different diagnostic scripts trying to figure out what's wrong. After years of troubleshooting SQL Server performance issues in different environments, I realized I kept reusing the same scripts over and over again. So I consolidated them into one toolkit. Today I’m releasing SQL Toolbox PRO. This is a personal side project I built in my free time. It’s a practical, production-focused SQL Server diagnostic toolkit designed for mid–senior developers and DBAs. What it does: Full server-wide performance scan Database health scoring Missing index impact analysis Blocking & deadlock detection Live performance analyzer Index maintenance (analyze / execute) HTML reporting SQL Agent automation templates No agents. No services. No external dependencies. Just T-SQL. The goal was simple: When a database is slow, I want answers in minutes — not hours. This is the first professional release (v1.0.0), and I’m offering a Founding Users launch edition for early adopters. If you work with SQL Server in production environments, I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from experienced peers. GitHub (Community Edition): https://lnkd.in/e5ZxmwU3 PRO Version: https://lnkd.in/eHxwCSwg Built by a SQL developer for real-world SQL Server problems. (Views are my own and this project is not affiliated with my employer.) #sqlserver #database #tsql #dba #databases

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My Go-To Recommendation for (Nearly) Every SQL Server Deployment Here’s one of the first things I install on any new SQL Server - and it saves hours of pain. Extended Events can be brutal. You’ve got to pick the right event, collect the right data, and then battle an unforgiving GUI... all just to troubleshoot blocking, waits, or slow queries. That’s why I install sp_humanevents. https://lnkd.in/g69sVZ4k It makes troubleshooting blocking, waits, and deadlocks actually... well, humane. It gets you to the answer, fast. Think of it as a modern, lightweight replacement for SQL Server Profiler (bless its dear soul). Massive thanks to Erik Darling for this indispensable tool. My servers (and my sanity) are grateful! What’s your go-to troubleshooting tool? #SQLServer #DBA #PerformanceTuning #ITPros #DatabaseEngineer

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The hardest part of SQL Server licensing isn’t the True-Up. It’s realizing—too late—that no one can confidently explain how licensing decisions were made. Not because people weren’t smart. Not because teams didn’t care. But because visibility arrived 𝗮𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿 commitments were locked in. Timing matters more than tools.

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One of my favorite new-ish features in Snowflake is Notebooks. You can easily pass data from cell to cell, using SQL in one cell, Python in another, and back to SQL again. Super handy! But watch out! They burn a little bit more credits. They have a 15 minute minimum timeout. Just be aware of your warehouse size and timeout settings!

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