SQL Server

At least once a month, a client has The Postgres Conversation™ with me. It happens at the end of a consulting engagement, after we’ve talked about the work that the team needs to do in order to meet their performance objectives. A manager who’s been quiet the whole meeting suddenly pipes up and quietly says,…

Office Hours: “Read This” Edition

Last Updated November 9, 2023

Sometimes when people post questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, the answer is just a link, nothing more, nothing less. It doesn’t make sense for me to rehash something that’s been covered really well online, and I want to link ’em to the best resource possible. Petr: Huge slowdown of basic queries when using a partitioned table (Partition_Key…

12 Office Hours Questions I Don’t Have Answers For

Last Updated September 18, 2023

Hey, you! You look smart. Here are highly-upvoted questions that fellow readers submitted at https://pollgab.com/room/brento that I don’t have answers for. If you’d like to jump into the comments, you can reference questions by number with your answers. Time to show off your brains! Kansas4444 asks: Hi Brent, do you have any advice on calculating…

Analyzing Prices of SQL Server Books, New & Used

Last Updated July 31, 2023

While on a road trip, Richie stopped by a used bookstore (or would that be used book store?) and made an amusing observation about the relative value of different SQL Server books. I just had to go look at Amazon for some research. I’m listing prices below, but keep in mind that when you click,…

Breaking News: SQL Server 2022 Keeps Getting Worse.

Last Updated May 26, 2023

<sigh> Okay, so, the last few Cumulative Updates have had known issues around broken remote queries using the generic ODBC connector and errors with contained availability groups, but I couldn’t really care less about those. If you use those features, I give you bombastic side eye anyway. However, in the last few days, two more…

It’s Been 6 Months. SQL Server 2022 Still Isn’t Ready Yet. (Updated)

Last Updated November 18, 2023

Six months ago today, Microsoft announced that SQL Server 2022 was ready. Except it wasn’t. And it still isn’t ready. See, look at the very first hero in their list of 2022’s new features: The very first one is “Business continuity through Azure – Bidirectional DR to Azure SQL.” However, buried way down in the footnotes, Microsoft admitted:…

Free Webcast Next Week! What’s New (and Actually Good) in SQL Server 2022

Last Updated May 4, 2023

It’s May 2023, and believe it or not, some of the flagship features in Microsoft’s latest version still aren’t ready for prime time yet. Good news, though: there are a few things that genuinely make your life easier with minimal work required on your part. Forget rewriting code, though – in this session, I’ll show…

How to Go Live on SQL Server 2022

Last Updated April 25, 2023

You’re planning to migrate to SQL Server 2022, and you want your databases to be faster after the migration. This is NOT a blog post about how to migrate – that’s the same as it’s been for a long time. Go build the new 2022 servers, and use log shipping or database mirroring to sync…

Is SQL Server 2019 More CPU-Intensive Than SQL Server 2016?

Last Updated March 28, 2023

SQL Server 2019

I’m running into something that I’m having a hard time believing. A client was hitting CPU issues during load testing, and they swore all things were equal between their SQL Server 2016 and 2019 environments. The 2019 box was having CPU pressure issues that didn’t show up on the 2016 box. I’ve played this game before,…

The 20th Anniversary of the SQL Slammer Worm

Last Updated January 10, 2023

Twenty years ago this month (next Wednesday to be exact), sysadmins and database administrators started noticing extremely high network traffic related to problems with their SQL Servers. The SQL Slammer worm was infecting Microsoft SQL Servers. Microsoft had known about it and patched the problem 6 months earlier, but people just weren’t patching SQL Server. There…

How to Install SQL Server and the Stack Overflow Database on a Mac

Last Updated October 28, 2023

To follow along, you’ll need: An Apple Mac with an Apple Silicon processor (M1, M2, etc – not an Intel or AMD CPU) Azure Data Studio Docker Desktop 4.25 or newer An Internet connection 1. Download & Run the SQL Server Container We’ll follow the instructions from Microsoft’s documentation, but I’m going to abbreviate ’em here…

Should You Use SQL Server 2022’s GREATEST and LEAST?

Last Updated December 15, 2022

If you’ve been following along with this week’s posts on DATETRUNC and STRING_SPLIT, you’re probably going to think the answer is no, but bear with me. It’s Christmas week, right? The news can’t all be bad. GREATEST and LEAST are kinda like MAX and MIN, but instead of taking multiple rows as input, they take multiple columns.…

Contest: Guess the Next SQL Server Release Date

Last Updated October 18, 2023

SQL Server 2025

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When will Microsoft officially release SQL Server 2024 (or 2025, or whatever it’ll be) for download? The dust is just barely starting to settle on the 2022 box, so it’s time to guess the next one. Leave one – and only one – comment here in YYYY/MM/DD format with your release date guess. If you…

#PASSdataCommunitySummit Keynote Day 3 Live Blog

Last Updated November 18, 2022

Today at the PASS Data Community Summit in Seattle, Kimberly Tripp is doing the first-ever in-person community keynote. Here’s the abstract: Over the 30+ years I’ve been working with SQL Server, I’ve seen an incredible amount of innovation and change. How do we keep up with so many changes and how do we know how…

SQL Server 2022 Paid Editions Require a Licensing Key.

Last Updated November 17, 2022

For the final release of SQL Server 2022, Microsoft popped a surprise that wasn’t in the release candidates: Your choices are: Install a free edition: Evaluation (which times out after 180 days), Developer (which isn’t allowed to be used for production purposes), or Express (which is limited to small databases & hardware resources) Use pay-as-you-go-billing,…

SQL Server 2022 Release Date: November 16, 2022

Last Updated November 16, 2022

Microsoft released SQL Server 2022 today, November 16, 2022. The footnotes indicate: SQL Server 2022 free editions (Developer edition, Express edition) are available to download starting today. SQL Server 2022 paid editions (Enterprise edition, Standard edition) will be available in Volume Licensing (Enterprise Agreement, Enterprise Agreement Subscriptions) customers starting today, which represents the majority of…

Office Hours: Read This, Watch This Edition

Last Updated November 10, 2022

This week, a lot of the questions you posted at https://pollgab.com/room/brento just need pointers to resources at other places. Welcome to the Read This, Watch This series of answers. Don’t Blame Anthony: Our developers prefer writing TSQL queries directly in their .NET code rather than writing sprocs and calling them. What are the pros /…

Free Live Webcast: Why is One Query Sometimes Slow and Sometimes Fast?

Last Updated September 28, 2022

Sometimes the exact same query goes slow out of nowhere. Your current fix is to update statistics, rebuild indexes, or restart the SQL Server. It works, but you don’t know why. The single most common reason is parameter sniffing. SQL Server “sniffs” the first set of parameters for a query, builds an execution plan for…

PSPO: How SQL Server 2022 Tries to Fix Parameter Sniffing

Last Updated August 24, 2022