Last week I wrote about the 6 best things Microsoft ever did to SQL Server, but now we gotta pull up a chair and discuss the stinkers. To be fair, I excluded anything that’s basically ANSI standard.…

This entire blog post is driven by the #1 feature in this list. I think about the #1 feature a lot, like at least once a week. I think about it so much that I had to stop and think about what other…

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In last week's Query Exercise, I challenged you to play some code golf to generate big spills with tiny T-SQL. Today, I'm going to walk you through my thought process - the initial attempts I tried and failed with, and the discoveries I made along the way, because I think it makes for fun storytelling. In the past, when I've seen people trying to generate a lot of data quickly, they've cross-joined SQL Server's built-in system tables like sys.all_objects or sys.all_columns.

A SQL Server monitoring tool is warning you that you’re getting memory dumps, and you’re wondering what that means. This isn’t normal: you’re encountering a situation where SQL Server is so freaked…

You work with Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, and Amazon RDS SQL Server. When people call in saying the server is slow, you're the one who has to take the call. It's up to you to figure out the bottleneck, which queries are causing that bottleneck, what changes to make to the queries, and whether index or server-level tweaks can help.

Fully distributed PostgreSQL

Ever wonder how big your database estate is compared to others? Whether you've got more servers, more databases, more workloads, or more problems? Well, if you're one of my SQL ConstantCare® customers, check your email: our first set of badges just went out! With SQL ConstantCare®, your SQL Servers send us diagnostic data once per day, and our systems analyze it and email you specific, actionable recommendations to make your databases faster and more reliable.

When I was testing SQL Server 2025’s new ability to limit TempDB usage with Resource Governor, I wrote a few fun diabolical demos. One of them was to generate giant spills to TempDB, quickly. When…

Nah, not necessarily. SQL Server's query optimizer behavior keeps changing with every freakin' version. Let's illustrate it with a simple query against the Stack Overflow Users table: CREATE INDEX Location ON dbo.Users(Location); GO SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.Users WHERE Location = N'Ahmadabad, India' OPTION (RECOMPILE); Because there are a lot of people in Ahmadabad, SQL Server gets that estimate correct, which is really important when you start joining this table to other tables, like finding their number of comments or posts:

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When I was testing SQL Server 2025's new ability to limit TempDB usage with Resource Governor, I wrote a few fun diabolical demos. One of them was to generate giant spills to TempDB, quickly. When you're looking at an actual (not estimated) query plan, and you see a yellow exclamation point on a sort operator, that means: SQL Server made a guess about how much memory it would need to accomplish that sort…

Wait! Before you install that next SQL Server, hold up. Are you sure you’re using the right version? I know, management wants you to stay on an older build, and the vendor says they’ll only support…

Today marks the official birthday of Microsoft SQL Server 2025. Here's where to download the evaluation version. Here are the top things you wanna consider as you talk to your managers, developers, and end users. The feature differences between 2025 Enterprise and Standard have been revealed, and the news for Standard Edition folks is spectacular: it now supports up to 32 CPU cores and 256GB RAM!

Fixes an issue in which nonclustered index corruption occurs and an error message is logged in SQL Server. This issue occurs when you run a complex UPDATE statement against a table in SQL Server…

I love SQL Server, and I'm excited for the release of 2025. I think the query processing keeps getting better, which means your apps are gonna go faster, with less code changes. The AI stuff is a little fluffy, and I don't think time will be kind to it, but I totally understand why Microsoft felt like they had to chase that buzzword.

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SQL Server 2025 and .NET 10 bring several new improvements to storing JSON natively in the database and querying it quickly. On the SQL Server 2025 side, the two big ones are the new native JSON indexes and the new JSON_CONTAINS function. Let's see their improvements in action. On the .NET 10 side, EF 10 not only supports the new JSON data type, but on databases of compatibility level 170 or higher, EF will automatically migrate JSON data from NVARCHAR(MAX) data types over to JSON the next time you do a migration, as explained in the…