This holiday season, we're running a sale specifically for fast learners. For record-low prices, get access to my SQL Server and Azure SQL DB training classes - but only for 3 months. If you're confident you can get your learn on quick, this is for you! But you better be prepared to move fast. The sale ends December 31, and you'll have just 3 months access to the classes.

It's the perfect time of year in Las Vegas when we can chill outside by the fire, enjoy a glass of wine, and go through your top-voted questions from Here's what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:54 iliyan Rashev: Hello Brent, I am on SQL Server 2019 RTM Please recommend a patching path: 1. Apply CU32+latest Sec.update 2. Apply only latest Sec.update In other words using the 2nd approach will be faster,but do I get all the previous fixes from CU32 that contain all fixes from previous CUs?

Continuation from the previous 131 parts, the whole series can be found at After spending some time thinking about the best way to come back to writing about Columnstore Indexes, after 5 and half y…

Say you’ve got a table with millions or billions of rows, and you need to delete some rows. Deleting ALL of them is fast and easy – just do TRUNCATE TABLE – but things get much harder when you need…

First off, I understand if you read the headline and you have a knee-jerk reaction. I totally understand that there are a lot of people out there who hate AI, and believe me, I hate most uses of it. Lots of its advice can be misleading at best, and absolute garbage at worst. I watch conference keynotes by big companies and I just roll my eyes at all the AI bullshit.

When you’re building an application for lots of clients, there are two common ways to design the database(s): Option A: Put all clients in the same database Option 2: Build one database per client…

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…