Free SQL Server help, 3× a week
Three blog posts a week, plus a Monday roundup of my favorite database news from around the web. No fluff, occasional jokes.
Recorded classes
The Fundamentals of Index Tuning, Query Tuning, and Server Tuning have all been updated as of July 2026, reflecting the latest advancements in the First Responder Kit, AI, and SQL Server 2025. They're perfect for folks who have never been to a formal training class, but are responsible for performance on SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, and Amazon RDS.
Browse the classesLive classes
Get first dibs (and the early-bird price) the moment registration opens.
Need hands-on help? SQL Critical Care® — my 2-day server assessment that finds the root cause and hands you the fix.
See consultingNormally 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:
You wanna learn PostgreSQL, and you wanna use a sample database with big real-world data, the same kinds of issues that pop up with real-life data distribution skew, and fun query challenges.
StackOverflow.com provides a free data dump in XML format with their data as of 2024-04. The data is licensed under cc-by-sa 4.0, which means whenever you use it for public demos, you'll need to link back to their original data source there, just as I did.
Ten years ago, I published a blog post with the top 10 most highly upvoted requests for Microsoft SQL Server as shown on their feedback site at the time, Connect.Microsoft.com. That site has gone out to a nice farm upstate, but let's revisit that top 10 list to see whether Microsoft actually built what you wanted.
This week, I'm back in Vegas, spending time in the home bar to recover from jet lag. I'm not saying booze is the best way to recover - but - it helps me fall asleep after a 16-hour-time-zone-jump, and it makes the career answers a lot more colorful. Let's go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
