A server you can throw away
The expensive part of a business application is not the licence. It is that after a few years nobody dares touch the server. Here is what changes.
The send that never arrives
A message sent inside an open transaction has not been sent. The Service Broker trap that makes the obvious implementation fail every single time.
The parts of SQL Server that were never SQL
COM objects, the command shell, Excel automation — the Windows-only half of SQL Server. What replaced it on Linux, and why one procedure was enough.
The host is an implementation detail
Most business software ends up married to the server it was installed on. When the application is the database, the host underneath becomes replaceable.