Let's hang out in the backyard - as recently seen on Zillow Gone Wild - and take your top-voted questions from Here's what we covered: 01:09 AussieDBA: I was saddened to hear of the passing of Andrew Clarke, who surely had the best pseudonym in the SQL industry, Phil Factor. His articles were some of the first I read online, and I was impressed with his complete and clear explanations.

In the Query Plan Pop Quiz, questions 2 and 3 asked you about what the sizes of arrows on query plans meant. The good news is that almost all of you got Question 2 right, but the bad news is that the vast majority of you got Question 3 completely incorrect, and the saddest part of that is that you've been using that inaccurate knowledge to guide your query tuning - and wasting your time.

I’mma be honest with you, dear reader: this query exercise stems from a client problem that I couldn’t figure out how to solve in the time constraints that I had, and it drove me crazy. I wanted to…

ALT: a bald man is laying on the floor with his hand on his chin .

TempDB is one of the banes of my existence. Anybody, anybody who can query your server can run a denial-of-service attack in a matter of seconds just by filling it up with a simple query: DROP TABLE IF EXISTS #big_problem; CREATE TABLE #big_problem (filler VARCHAR(8000)); WHILE 1 = 1 INSERT INTO #big_problem SELECT REPLICATE('X', 8000) FROM GENERATE_SERIES(1, 100000); This while loop will gradually fill up TempDB, and when one of the attempts eventually fails, that's okay because the session stays open.

You’ve been telling yourself, “One of these days, I’ll finally take Brent’s classes.”

You’ve been working with SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, or Amazon RDS SQL Server for years. You’re jaded. You’re confident. You’re pretty sure you know what you’re doing. You’ve never taken my Mastering…

In last week's Query Plans Pop Quiz, the first question was, someone hands you these two queries and you get their estimated plans to decide which query to tune. Perhaps you get the estimated plans from SSMS, or from sp_BlitzCache, or from your monitoring tool. The question was, which query should you focus on tuning? A disturbing number of comments pointed at the top query, saying that it had 100% of the cost, and that its sort was 99% of that giant cost.

YouTube video by MegaGFilms

ALT: a man and a woman are standing in a living room and the woman is holding a box that says converse

SQL Server Management Studio 22 Preview 3 is out, and it brings with it a new Query Hint Recommendation tool. Start by highlighting the query you want to test, then click Tools, Query Hint Recommendation Tool. It slides out a new pane on the right hand side: The maximum tuning time defaults to 300 seconds, but I tacked on a couple zeroes because my slow query already took ~20 seconds to run on its own, and I wanted to give the wizard time to wave his little wand around.

You've been telling yourself, "One of these days, I'll finally take Brent's classes." Get ready, because that day is coming: my Black Friday sales run all November long, and they're the biggest sale of the year! SQL Server 2025, 2022, and 2019 all dramatically changed the game for performance tuning. We have more and better tooling than we've ever had before, and there are new places to look when performance goes wrong.

You’ve been working with SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, or Amazon RDS SQL Server for years. You’re jaded. You’re confident. You’re pretty sure you know what you’re doing. You’ve never taken my Mastering classes because you’ve read the blog, watched the live streams, and figured you’ve pieced it all together. You can’t imagine there’s anything left to learn — no surprises left in the box.