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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.
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:
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.
