Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

What is Dynamic SQL in SQL Server?

Dynamic SQL in SQL Server is built for scenarios where queries can’t be fully defined in advance. It’s the method of choice when structure depends on user input, variable schemas, or runtime conditions, cases where static SQL falls short. However, without proper structure, this flexibility introduces security and maintenance challenges. To make it work at scale, you need a disciplined approach.

Will custobots drive $98 trillion in payments by 2027?

It starts like this. You wake up groggily and stumble into the kitchen. The coffee machine is already brewing your favourite blend. But that’s not the surprise. It's the message on your phone: "Coffee beans restocked. $10 paid. Delivery by noon." You didn’t place an order. You didn't lift a finger. Your machine did it for you. Welcome to 2025, where your devices aren't just smart, they're economically independent. These are machine customers (custobots). They negotiate. They pay.

Best Tool for Composing Git Commits in your IDE, Commit Composer in GitLens 17.4

In GitLens 17.2 we introduced Commit Composer as an early preview of a set of AI-powered tools to help you craft cleaner, more meaningful commits. With GitLens 17.4, Commit Composer has leveled up. Based on your feedback, it’s now a fully interactive drafting experience that lets you compose commits in a single click, and puts you in control of your commit history.

Failover and cloud aren't enough for reliability

Amin Momin of @CapgeminiGlobal talks about reliability takes dedicated effort beyond just using the cloud and setting up failover. Full transcript: There are two misconceptions about reliability. One is people only think failover is reliability. Just doing the failover, that will be enough from the reliability point of view. That's the first one. And the second one: we are deployed into the cloud, so it is the service provider's responsibility to provide the reliability.

How Elasticsearch Works: Documents, JSON & Index Explained

Ever wondered how Elasticsearch can search any kind of data? In this video, we break it down with a simple deck of cards analogy that makes indexing easy to understand. Each card is like a JSON document with fields and values, suit, color, number, type. Combine them and you’ve built an index, giving Elasticsearch the power to answer queries like “show me all the red cards” or “show me only the face cards.” If you can describe it, you can index it, and if you can index it, you can search it.

Monitor Apple Silicon GPU on macOS with macmon + Hosted Graphite

Your Mac’s GPU is a massively parallel processor that handles anything from animating the UI to heavy lifting in video editors, 3D tools, games, and on-device machine learning models. Think Final Cut Pro exports, Blender renders, Stable Diffusion, WebGPU demos, or shader builds in Xcode - which are all tasks that require heavy GPU.

Introducing ping and TCP port monitoring (and lots of other improvements)

A couple months ago, we sent out a survey to all our users asking what they like about Oh Dear, how they use it, and how we could improve our service. One of the things that was asked a lot was ping and TCP port monitoring. The past few months we worked hard to add this kind of monitoring to our service. And while building it, we touched upon other parts of our service and improved lots of little things. And I'm proud to share that we now have shipped it all! Let's go through it!