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.

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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.

The spirit of Halloween is that people come to your house and get something free. Well, I don’t want any visitors so I’m saving people the trip. Here’s a lovely spooky mix for the speed drinkers and t

Warning: I’m about to overly simplify a whole lot of topics to make things easy. Armchair architects, warm up your flamethrowers. Your table has rows and columns kinda like a spreadsheet: In most…

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…