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Fresh from the blog

All posts

How to Download the Stack Overflow Database for Postgres

August 26, 2026

You wanna learn PostgreSQL, and you wanna use a sample database with big real-world data, the same kinds of issues that pop up with real-life data distribution skew, and fun query challenges.

StackOverflow.com provides a free data dump in XML format with their data as of 2024-04. The data is licensed under cc-by-sa 4.0, which means whenever you use it for public demos, you'll need to link back to their original data source there, just as I did.

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News & Opinion

It’s Been 10 Years. Has Microsoft Built What You Voted For?

August 25, 2026

Ten years ago, I published a blog post with the top 10 most highly upvoted requests for Microsoft SQL Server as shown on their feedback site at the time, Connect.Microsoft.com. That site has gone out to a nice farm upstate, but let's revisit that top 10 list to see whether Microsoft actually built what you wanted.

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