Introducing Perplexity Comet: The AI Browser That Works For You

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I have been working on AI technologies both on my personal time and in my day job. And I wanted to share more about the new AI-browser, Comet. Perplexity Comet is an innovative AI-powered browser designed to transform how you browse the web and get things done. With Comet, you can automate tasks that usually take hours, such as finding the lowest possible airfare for a multi-city trip. Just describe your travel plan in plain English—Comet handles the rest, searching across different airlines, comparing options, and surfacing the best deals without any manual work. Now with OpenAI launching it’s own AI browser and Gemini (from Google) making progress in this area, one can easily foresee a big browser wars on the horizon!

Give Perplexity Comet a try. It’s key benefits include:

  • AI Assistant Integration: Comet provides contextual answers, page summaries, follow-up queries, and actionable insights within every tab through an embedded AI assistant.​
  • Agentic Actions: The assistant can perform tasks such as shopping, filling carts, scheduling meetings, managing emails, engaging with calendar events, and unsubscribing from newsletters—often operating directly on behalf of the user.​
  • Workflow Organization: Users can organize tabs, automate research, and streamline distracting tasks to stay focused and productive.​
  • Privacy and Personalization: Comet is built to learn user preferences, collaborate in research, and maintain privacy as a core principle, helping keep browsing sessions efficient and tailored.

I really like the user experience it offers and the in-browser automation for common tasks like looking up best prices for a product, lowest airfares, writing a post, etc. Comet rolled out globally for free in October 2025, aiming to democratize access to AI-powered browsing and productivity tools. Earlier this year, Perplexity and Venmo/PayPal offered early access to Perplexity’s new Comet Browser with Free Perplexity Pro Subscription.

Disclaimer valid as of the date of publication:
Artificial Intelligence was employed to aid in the composition of this post.
I may receive a referral bonus from the referral links included in this post.

Addressing SQL Server and TDE with AKV errors

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I recently wrote an Azure Data Studio Notebook on how to setup TDE for SQL Server 2019 Standard Edition (yes, SQL Server 2019 Standard Edition has TDE) using Azure Key Vault. I ran into a few issues that I had to debug, which I am outlining below. Make sure that you are following the pre-requisites when you are setting TDE with Azure Key Vault.

The first one was a 404 error. When I looked the application event log, I saw the following error:

Operation: getKeyByName
Key Name: ContosoRSAKey0
Message: [error:112, info:404, state:0] The server responded 404, because the key name was not found. Please make sure the key name exists in your vault.

The simple reason for the above error is that I was using an incorrect key name or the key didn’t exist in my Azure Key Vault. So the remediation is to check if the key exists in your Azure Key Vault. If not, then create the key.

Another error I ran into was a 401 error. The following information was included with the event:

Operation: acquireToken
Key Name:
Message: [error:108, info:401, state:0] Server responded 401 for the request. Make sure the client Id and secret are correct, and the credential string is a concatenation of AAD client Id and secret without hyphens.

The CREATE CREDENTIAL command has the following syntax:

CREATE CREDENTIAL Azure_EKM_TDE_cred WITH IDENTITY = 'SQLStandardKeyVault', -- for global Azure -- WITH IDENTITY = 'ContosoDevKeyVault.vault.usgovcloudapi.net', -- for Azure Government -- WITH IDENTITY = 'ContosoDevKeyVault.vault.azure.cn', -- for Azure China 21Vianet -- WITH IDENTITY = 'ContosoDevKeyVault.vault.microsoftazure.de', -- for Azure Germany SECRET = '<combination of AAD Client ID without hyphens and AAD Client Secret>' FOR CRYPTOGRAPHIC PROVIDER AzureKeyVault_EKM_Prov

The IDENTITY here is the name of your Azure key vault.
The SECRET here is your AAD Client ID (with the hyphens removed) and your AAD Client Secret concatenated together. You will need to create a “New Client Secret” for your Azure AD app registration. See steps here.

Your AAD Client ID will be a GUID and so will your Client Secret will be a random alphanumeric string. If you don’t have the client secret, then create new one and use that.

Upcoming sessions at Microsoft Ignite and PASS Summit

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The next week of November is going to be an action packed week for me with two back to back conferences: Microsoft Ignite 2019, Orlando, Florida and PASS Summit 2019, Seattle, Washington.

Below are the sessions that I will be delivering at Microsoft Ignite.

Mission critical performance with SQL Server 2019 – In this session, my colleague, Kevin Farlee, and I will be talking about the various performance and scale improvements that SQL Server 2019 will be delivering at a great price performance that lets you run SQL Server 2019 with the best TCO for your Tier-1 workloads.

Azure SQL Database Edge – Overview – In this session, my colleague, Sourabh Agarwal, and I will talk about the new innovations we are bringing to the edge for ARM64 and x64 with Azure SQL Database Edge. We will also talk about some of the scenarios where Azure SQL Database Edge helped make our customers successful in their IoT applications.

Azure Arc: Bring Azure Data Services to On-Premises, Multi-Cloud and Edge – In this session, James Rowland Jones and I will walk you through the Azure Arc announcements and show you deployments of our data services on Azure Arc.

If you are going to Ignite and are interested in Data, then we hope to see you at our sessions.

At PASS Summit, I will be deliver another session on Azure SQL Database Edge which will talk more about how you can “Develop once, deploy anywhere” with our edge database offering.

Looking forward to see the #SQLFamily at PASS Summit and Microsoft Ignite.

SQL PASS Summit 2017

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It is that time of the year when I get to meet the SQL Family. It is always wonderful to put a face to that Twitter handle that I exchanged #sqlchats with or connected with on LinkedIn. SQL PASS Summit is probably one of the largest gathering of data professionals under a single roof.

This year, I will be presenting a session on “Building One Million Predictions Per Second Using SQL-R”.

Date: Nov 3rd, 2017
Time: 11am
Room: Tahoma 5 (TCC Level 3)
Abstract:
Using the power of OLTP and data transformation in SQL 2016 and advanced analytics in Microsoft R Server, various industries that really push the boundary of processing higher number of transaction per second (tps) for different use cases. In this talk, we will walk through the use case of predicting loan charge off (loan default) rate, architecture configuration that enable this use case, and rich visual dashboard that allow customer to do what-if analysis. Attend this session to find out how SQL + R allows you to build an “intelligent data warehouse”.

There will be a number of sessions delivered at PASS from the Tiger team this year and you will find a lot of the folks at the SQL Server Clinic.

If you have a technical question, a troubleshooting challenge, give product feedback, or want to find out about best practices running your SQL Server? Then the SQL Clinic is the place you want to go to. SQL Clinic is the hub of technical experts from SQL Product Group (including Tiger team), SQL CAT, SQL Customer Support Services (CSS), SQL Premier Field Engineering (PFE) and others.

SQL PASS Summit gives me an unique opportunity to meet the #SQLFamily during an annual event, gather feedback from customers and get to see some old friends from across the globe!

Hope to see you at the event!

SQL Saturday 686–Upgrade your SQL Server like a Ninja

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There is a plethora of Data Platform subject matter experts who will be descending at Portland this weekend to mingle with data professionals. What’s more a number of them will be surfacing a week later at the SQL PASS Summit as well.  I am eagerly looking forward to the data drive conversations. I have always been a big proponent of sharing the knowledge with the community and SQL Saturday is great way to do that.

There are multiple tracks which will be running on the same day. There are a number of sessions from various known community subject matter experts on various subjects on the tracks listed above and also from the Microsoft SQL Server Tiger team. I am really looking forward to this event! This will be an awesome prelude to PASS!

I will be presenting a session on upgrading your SQL Server and how we have helped Enterprises upgrade their SQL Server instances through various automations that are available using recent tools that Microsoft has shipped.

Session name: Upgrade your SQL Server like a Ninja

Duration: 70 minutes

Date: 28th Oct, 2017

Timing: 10.10am – 11.20am

Session Abstract

Are you thinking about upgrading your SQL Server environment to the latest and greatest that your data platform has to offer? If yes, then let us show you how you can perform risk-free and automated upgrades for SQL Server. In this session, you will see the new experiences Microsoft is building for performing Tier-1 SQL Server upgrades at scale through automated assessments, robust performance validation and using product features to minimize downtime.

Hope to see you at the event!