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.
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Need hands-on help? SQL Critical Care® — my 2-day server assessment that finds the root cause and hands you the fix.
See consultingYou'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.
In my free How to Think Like the Engine class, I gloss over the entire concept of B-trees and just hand-wavily say "SQL Server can seek to the page that has the row you're looking for." That's always kinda bothered me, so I finally gave in to temptation and whipped up an animated example of a clustered index on the Users table:
