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Three blog posts a week, plus a Monday roundup of my favorite database news from around the web. No fluff, occasional jokes.
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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.
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See consultingThis week's top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento finds us opening ChatGPT multiple times! It's fun to show how I use it, and what it thinks of me.
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You've heard that page splits are bad, and they're an indication that your table design is making your storage work too hard. You've heard that the right answer to fix it is adjusting fill factor lower, or doing regular index maintenance.
Before you watch the below animation, you'll wanna get up to speed with how index seeks work. Then, let's explain page splits with an animation:
For this month's T-SQL Tuesday, I invited y'all to tell me how you know a query's gonna be bad when you open it. Riccardo Perico and Shane O'Neill says WHILE loops and/or CURSORs are pretty good indicators. I agree, because especially when you're opening code in the year 2026, and someone still hasn't figured this out…
This isn't specifically database-related, but it's the kind of thing I'm really into, so maybe you're into it too.
I sat down with Giovana Carvalho, the Managing Director at Teachable, the e-commerce platform I use to sell training classes, and we chatted about what AI is good for these days, and where its rough edges are.
