Clik here to view.
Your Data Career is Stuck in a Rut.
You haven’t really grown as a data professional this year. You’re kinda floating along in your database career, reading blogs, attending webcasts now and then. Maybe you’ll hit a SQL Saturday this...
View ArticleClik here to view.
57% of Your Bosses Are Cheap. (Well, maybe 100% of your boss in particular.)
You know what I’ve noticed about companies? Some companies buy tools for you, but they just don’t have a training budget. They believe they hired you to solve problems, and you should have come with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Other Data People are Getting Ahead of You.
The next time you need to look for a job, I’ve got some bad news for you. A lot of other people are gonna stand out from the crowd and get way, way ahead of you in the line. They’ve learned how to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
My annual Black Friday sale starts tomorrow. Here’s what you wanna know.
The time is almost here – the moment you’ve been waiting for all year. I’ve sharpened my pencils to take the prices as low as I can possibly take ’em: Level 1: Fundamentals$295Recorded Class Season...
View ArticleClik here to view.
My Annual Black Friday Sale is On Now! Save 50-82%.
The time is finally here, the moment you’ve been waiting for all year: your chance to save 50-82% on my training classes and online services. Everything on the site is 50% off during November, but you...
View ArticleClik here to view.
SQL Server 2019 is out…now.
After just one release candidate, Microsoft has decided it’s ready to go, apparently! Well, kinda: the official build in the release notes is 15.0.2000.5, and there’s already a “servicing update” to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine: Using Statistics to Build Query Plans
In our last episode, SQL Server was picking between index seeks and table scans, dancing along the tipping point to figure out which one would be more efficient for a query. One of my favorite things...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine: When Statistics Don’t Help
In our last episode, we saw how SQL Server estimates row count using statistics. Let’s write two slightly different versions of our query – this time, only looking for a single day’s worth of users –...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine: Building Wider Indexes to Deal with...
In our last episode, we were running into problems with these two queries:SELECT LastAccessDate, Id, DisplayName, Age FROM dbo.Users WHERE LastAccessDate BETWEEN '2018-08-31' AND '2018-09-01' ORDER BY...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine: Should Columns Go In the Key or the...
In our last episode, in between crab rangoons, I had you create either one of these two indexes:CREATE INDEX IX_LastAccessDate_Id_Includes ON dbo.Users(LastAccessDate, Id) INCLUDE (DisplayName, Age);...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Contest: Guess the SQL Server 2020 Release Date
When will Microsoft officially release SQL Server 2020 for download? The dust is just barely starting to settle on the 2019 box, so it’s time to guess the next one. Leave one – and only one – comment...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Would you attend the Mastering classes on a weekend?
I notice that a lot of you are springing for my Black Friday deals with your own money rather than the company’s money. That got me wondering – if you’re paying for it out of pocket, maybe your company...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine: Included Columns Aren’t Free.
In our last cliffhanger episode, I said that if we ran this query:UPDATE dbo.Users SET Age = Age + 1 WHERE Id = 643; And we had this index:CREATE INDEX IX_LastAccessDate_Id_DisplayName_Age ON...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Announcing a New Live Online Class: How I Use the First Responder Kit
During the hands-on labs for my Mastering classes, when I’m answering an attendee question, this kind of thing happens a lot: Attendee: “How would I find the query causing that missing index...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Many Problems with SQL Server’s Index Recommendations
These days, I jump back & forth a lot between SQL Server and Postgres. (We use AWS Aurora Postgres to store SQL ConstantCare®‘s data.) Whenever I come back to the sweet, sweet graphical execution...
View ArticleClik here to view.
SQL ConstantCare® Now Gives Index Advice, Too.
When I was a DBA, I got so sick and tired of monitoring tools and scripts yelling at me to make a million different changes – most of which didn’t really have any measurable impact on performance or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
I’m coming to SQL Saturday Stockholm! Registration is open now.
Hello again, Sweden! I’m coming to SQL Saturday Stockholm in May 2020. I’ll be teaching my Performance Tuning in 21 Demos workshop: You’re a developer or DBA who wants to tune indexes and queries to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
So, uh, you can, like, draw me in SSMS.
Adrian Sullivan and Michael J. Swart have way too much time on their hands, because Adrian just posted this T-SQL gist, which draws … me: It uses the spatial results feature in SSMS. My mind is blown....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Announcing Weekend Versions of My Mastering Classes
Last week, I noticed that an awful lot of you were buying my Level 2 and Level 3 Bundles with your own personal money (not company cards), so I wondered – if your company wasn’t paying for it, were...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Writing Diagnostic Queries is Hard Because SQL Server Still Has (Tiny) Bugs.
When I first got started working with SQL Server, I assumed it was flawless because it came in a sealed box from a ginormous corporation. I figured they’d tested every edge case, and that there was no...
View Article