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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.
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 probably heard of the setting Max Degree of Parallelism. I hate that name: it should really be called just plain ol' Degrees of Parallelism, and here's why. There are a lot of conflicting opinions out there about how to set it, and Microsoft has official guidance about it in that article above. It's basically set…
Common Table Expressions are awesome because they let SQL Server reorder processing in whatever way it deems to be the most efficient for your current data distribution, on your current version of SQL Server. Default to CTEs.
When SQL Server gets that process wrong, switch to temp tables.
Today I'm hanging out in the dining room, or what would normally be a dining room, but we use it to store a 1992 Honda Beat. I explain why, and then take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. The audio on this one is a little tinny - the room is super-echo-y and I don't think the camera picked up my lapel microphone. Sorry about that!
Over the years, tables - like your waistline - tend to get bigger. We keep tacking on more and more columns, one at a time, in order to handle app needs. It's easier to add "just one more column" than it is to break things off into a whole separate table. When you're only handling…
