Performance Tuning
Database Animations: The Interview Question Everybody Gets Wrong
No no, I'm not just talking about the people answering the interview question.
I'm talking about the people asking the question.
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Who’s Hiring Database People? September 2026 Edition
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Free Webcast: You Shouldn’t Use SQL Agent for Batch Processes.
SQL Server Agent is a solid scheduler for database administration and simple, database-local automation. In a small to midsize shop, it is the right tool for backing up databases, checking for corruption, and maintaining statistics.
But as a shop grows in complexity, Agent starts running into its limits, and teams find themselves duct-taping together workarounds to cover the gaps.
Performance Tuning
Database Animations: What’s a Residual Predicate and Why Is It Bad?
Normally when you're looking at an execution plan, and you see an index seek followed by a key lookup, that means it's running relatively quickly.
To explain, let's take the Users table in the Stack Overflow database and run this query that we explained in this post:
