Wise Owl's monthly (ish) news tweet | Issue 94 - February 2026

The items included in this newsletter are listed below. Our newsletter go out about once a month - if you'd like to subscribe, just let us know!

We now offer Snowflake SQL courses (and will consider offering Postgres ones too)

The Snowflake user interface (Snowsight) is very different from SQL Server Management Studio:

What's a workspace? This is a very different coding environment!

There are also slight (but annoying) differences between Snowflake SQL and Microsoft's T-SQL. Because of this we've created 3 new dedicated Snowflake courses:

Course	Days	Covers
Introduction	2	Writing SQL queries to select data from Snowflake databases
Advanced	2	Stored procedures, functions and other Snowflake SQL programming topics
Fast-track	3	An attempt to cover the previous 2 courses' material in 3 intensive days!

You can see the differences between Snowflake SQL and SQL Server SQL in this detailed blog. If on the other hand you'd like to organise Postgres SQL training for your team, please contact us to get a quote.

New software: Visual Studio 2026, changes to SSRS and the January 2026 Power BI update

Visual Studio 2026 was introduced to the world on 11th November of last year:

The new Visual Studio 2026 interface and Settings tab.

Now that there have been a few post-release bug fixes, here are our impressions.

Staying with software enhancements, the January update to Power BI Desktop means that you can now use images or icons as Azure map markers, and there are also tweaks to the colour picker and the way you reset formatting (oh, and the Q&A visual is being deprecated). And speaking of deprecation, no new releases of SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) will happen, as paginated reports will now be exclusively published to (and created from) Power BI Report Server. You can see a bit more information on the death of SSRS here.

Our next webinar (on using AI tools effectively) is from Andy Brown next Friday 6th February

Join Andy (Brown) at 12.15pm on Friday 6th February for our next (free!) webinar on using AI tools effectively:

Which tool should you be using, if any? And how can you get the most out of it?

You can see a history of previous webinars here, together with links to videos of them should you wish to watch them in your own time.

Wikipedia have a presentation, video and quiz to celebrate their 25th birthday

Wikipedia was 25 years old on 16th January, and has launched a new experience, video and quiz to celebrate its anniversary:

A screen-shot near the beginning of the Wikipedia experience presentation.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos may have more money, but Jimmy Wales (the founder of Wikipedia) is surely richer in every other way!

Google's Nano Banana and Veo have had rave reviews for their images/videos. Do they deserve them?

There's been a lot of talk online recently about how good Nano Banana and Veo are (they generate images and videos respectively within Google Gemini 3 Pro). Is the hype justified?

One of my little experiments in Veo.

To save you the bother I've road-tested Nano Banana against ChatGPT and Veo against itself. The executive summary? A cautious no - but please judge for yourself.

Identify the song titles containing one extra letter (for fun, and for the chance to win £50)

A gremlin has added an additional letter to 20 song titles in our office. You know the sort of thing:

"Isn't Shep lovely?" by Stevie Wonder (the real competition doesn't rely on obscure references to 1970s chidren's TV programs!).

See how many you can get, then send us your efforts - we'll fill in the missing answers to put you out of your misery and put your name in our randomised electronic sorting hat, giving you a chance (proportional to your number of correct answers) of winning £50. Speaking of which, congratulations to David Thompson of Bury Council: his name was the first of 32 drawn out of the weighted randomised sorting hat for December's quiz. You can see the answers to the quiz here.

Note that to keep our website content up-to-date we only publish newsletters from the last 3 calendar years.

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