20+ years of books, papers, courses, and writing on databases and AI
Two December papers on retrieval problems worth knowing about.
One model. Three modes. Three different answers.
In 2023, my boss at MongoDB sent me an article about LLMs and hallucinations.
I embedded two queries: 'home with pool' and 'home without pool.' The cosine similarity was 0.82.
Five production realities worth understanding first.
How semantic reranking transforms vector search results.
Claude has infinite patience. You don't.
You can debug production at 2AM but can you survive roadmap planning season?
How vector search recall patterns emerged from testing 100,000 properties.
The case for thinking in public.
In the AI era, taste becomes a competitive advantage.
The friction is the point.
Comprehensive course preparing SQL Server DBAs and Developers for AI-powered semantic search. Covers vector embeddings, VECTOR_DISTANCE, DiskANN indexing, hybrid search, and production deployment.
View course details →System and method for cardinality estimation feedback loops in query processing. Co-inventor with Pedro Lopes, Vasileios Papadimos, and others at Microsoft.
View patent →Microsoft whitepaper covering the first major redesign of the SQL Server Query Optimizer cardinality estimation process since version 7.0.
Read whitepaper →Updated edition covering SQL Server 2012 features. Co-authored with Jason Brimhall and others.
View on Amazon →A problem-solution approach covering T-SQL data manipulation, stored procedures, triggers, UDFs. 700+ pages.
View on Amazon →Practical recipes for DBAs and developers. Covers SQL Server 2005 features with minimal theory.
View on Amazon →Task-based guide: installation, backup, security, replication, clustering, performance. 980 pages.
View on Amazon →Technical deep-dive on cardinality estimation feedback mechanisms in SQL Server query processing.
Watch video →Overview of query processing improvements and intelligent query processing features.
Watch video →Technical session on SQL Server internals and optimization techniques.
Watch video →Led product teams at Microsoft (SQL Server, Azure SQL, SQL Copilot), Elastic (Elasticsearch core), and MongoDB (query processing, Atlas Search). Shipped 12+ query processing features improving billions of daily queries.
Microsoft Certified Master (SQL Server 2005 & 2008). Former Senior Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft. Acting Program Manager for the SQL Server MCM certification program (2009-2011).