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[Video] Office Hours: SQL Server Career Q&A, Part 3
Here’s the last video in my vacation series with the answers to your most-upvoted professional development questions. Enjoy! I won’t be taking new questions in the comments, but I’m leaving the...
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Your Ten Favorite Blog Posts from 2020
The most popular posts this year were when I ran my Fundamentals classes for free throughout the year. I ran a different class per month, and posted signups and videos here on the blog. I’m setting...
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Are You Underpaid? Find Out in the Data Professional Salary Survey Results.
We asked what you make, and 1,747 of you in 69 countries answered. Altogether, you made $171,879,034 this year. Hubba hubba, there’s some earning power in this audience. Download the Data Professional...
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Want to Avoid Deployment Downtime? Replication Probably Isn’t the Answer.
You’re tired of taking outages to deploy changes to your database schema. Wouldn’t it be cool to have two different SQL Servers so that you could: Point your customer traffic at ServerA Apply your...
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Which Microsoft Certification Should You Get?
You work with data, and you’re thinking about getting a Microsoft certification. Which one should you get? If you need the certification to get a job… Then get the certification you see mentioned the...
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We Lost Gareth Swanepoel.
Thirteen years ago, I met Gareth Swanepoel (@GarethSwan) for the first time, interviewed him for his first real sysadmin job, and … turned him down. Gareth Swanepoel circa 2007 Thankfully, my manager...
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Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for January 2021
You know how a lot of app release notes say “bug fixes and improvements”? We’re not gonna lie: this one’s all bug fixes. Huge shout out to the community contributors for catching stuff and contributing...
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Query Hints You Can Use to Avoid Blocking
No, not NOLOCK. You get the wrong query results, even when your query results aren’t supposed to be changing. I’m talking about when you need to do writes, but you want your query to get along with...
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What SQL Server Feature Do You Wish Would Go Away?
I asked a two-part question on Twitter: if you could only remove one feature from SQL, why would it be cursors? If you could only remove one feature from SQL, why would it be cursors? — Brent Ozar...
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Free Webcast: Help! My SQL Server Maintenance is Taking Too Long!
“Time for a smoke break.” You manage growing SQL Server databases with shrinking nightly maintenance windows. You just don’t have enough time left each night to do the necessary backups, corruption...
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“But Surely NOLOCK Is Okay If No One’s Changing Data, Right?”
Some of y’all, bless your hearts, are really, really, really in love with NOLOCK. I’ve shown you how you get incorrect results when someone’s updating the rows, and I’ve shown how you get wrong-o...
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Can You Get Parameter Sniffing on Updates and Deletes?
Sure you can – parameter sniffing is everywhere. Anytime that you have one piece of code that needs to handle a varying number of rows, you’re probably gonna have to worry about parameter sniffing....
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My Live Streaming Setup for 2021: Iceland Edition
Erika and I moved to Iceland for a while. For those of you who don’t follow my personal blog, here’s why we moved, and how we got here with a teleworker visa. You can spy on our adventures via my...
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Unusual Parameter Sniffing: Big Problems with Small Data
Normally when we think about parameter sniffing, we think about a tiny data vs big data problem: the tiny data’s plan goes in first, and when we try to process big data, performance is terrible. But...
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What’s a Size-of-Data Operation?
Database professionals say, “That’s slow because it’s a size-of-data operation.” A size-of-data operation is when the database has to write all of the affected data again. What you’re asking for might...
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Query Store is the Flight Data Recorder. It’s Obvious What We Need Next.
When Microsoft brought out Query Store, they wrote: Similar to an airplane’s flight data recorder, Query Store collects and presents detailed historic information about all queries, greatly simplifying...
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What’s New & Undocumented in SQL Server 2019 Cumulative Update 9
Last week’s SQL Server 2019 Cumulative Update 9 snuck in some undocumented things. We got two new DMVs for Always On Availability Groups, sys.dm_hadr_cached_replica_states and...
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Changing Statistics Cause Longer Compilation Times
I need to be up front with you, dear reader, and tell you that you’re probably never going to need to know this. I try to blog about stuff people need to know to get their job done – things that will...
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How to Trace a Nested Stored Procedure Without Using Profiler
You’ve got a stored procedure that calls other stored procedures that build dynamic SQL that call other functions, and there’s so much calling going on that you would like to phone a friend. Your query...
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Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for February 2021
Along with the usual bug fixes & improvements, this month’s release includes a brand new sp_BlitzAnalysis script from Adrian Buckman. It’s for folks who have an Agent job to log sp_BlitzFirst to...
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