When you've got questions about architecture, development, or best practices, post 'em at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, and upvote the ones you'd like to see me cover. It's like free bite-sized consulting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCbPSYmCTHg
If there was ever a release you should skip for reliability reasons, it's this one. There's a lot of AI-edited code in here. I'm really only putting it out there because I want to let early adopters start playing around with a few new things: sp_BlitzIndex adds an @AI parameter to get index consolidation advice…
On July 14, 2026, Microsoft's extended support ends for SQL Server 2016.
They will offer Extended Security Updates that you can buy for 3 more years, either through Azure or your licensing partner. The price is stunning:
Need to share an execution plan, like on forums or on Stack Overflow, and you wanna get their advice as quickly as possible? Paste the XML into PasteThePlan.com and you get a link that you can share to anyone with your plan's details.
The user interface is now cleaner, with separate tabs for query plan, query text, AI suggestions, raw XML, and your recent plans:
Let's go through a LOT of your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento on a VERY early Saturday morning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7lGcm8CyEM
Let's have some fun.
Put yourself in the frame of mind of the fella who writes this blog.
The short answer: in the real world, only the first column works. When SQL Server needs data about the second column, it builds its own stats on that column instead (assuming they don't already exist), and uses those two statistics together - but they're not really correlated.
For the longer answer, let's take a large version of the Stack Overflow database, create a two-column index on the Users table, and then view the resulting statistics:
Is your company hiring for a database position as of April 2026? Do you wanna work with the kinds of people who read this blog? Let's make a love connection.
If your company is hiring, leave a comment. The rules:
April 1, 2026: Big news for everyone who has to manage Microsoft SQL Server, whether they're DBAs, sysadmins, or developers.
Seven years ago, Microsoft announced automatic, downtime-free hot patching of the SQL Server engine in Azure SQL DB. The tail end of that post had a teaser in it:
Ever just need a quick visualization of some numbers to get a rough idea of the trend, like this:
Option 1: ask Copilot to write the query for you.
Well, maybe mountain is a bit of a strong word, but it's one of the highest elevation home sites in Las Vegas, with beautiful views over the valley, the Strip, the airport, and the surrounding mountains. Let's go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento while taking in the view - and you can move the camera around, since this is an Insta360 video.
PasteThePlan has a new AI Suggestions tab, and it's been really fun to watch the query plans come in and the advice go out. Here are some examples: Date "tables" - when I looked at the query, I glossed over the real problem. I thought arc_Calendar was a real date table, but AI figured out…
There are a lot of shopping days left before Christmas, and even more before the next version of SQL Server ships, so might as well get my wish list over to Santa now so the elves can start working on ignoring them.
My work focuses on performance tuning, so that's what my wish list focuses on, too. They really are wishes, like I-want-a-pony, because I know I'm discussing some stuff that's easy to describe, but really challenging to implement.
Copilot in SSMS has two parts. Usually people focus on the pop-out Copilot chat window, and that's useful for sure, but honestly I think you're going to get way more mileage out of the code completions feature, right away, because it blends in with your existing workflows. Let's say that I'm working with the Stack…
I'm up in North Bay, Ontario, Canada for the 2026 Can-Am Curling Cup run by Aaron Bertrand - and my team actually won!
Let's bask in the warmth (cough) of our glory as we go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
For the last few years, I've slowed the First Responder Kit release down to once per quarter. It felt pretty feature-complete, and I didn't want to make y'all upgrade any more than you have to. You're busy, and I don't want to take up your time unless there's something really big to gain from doing an upgrade.
At PasteThePlan.com, you can paste execution plans into your browser, then send a link to someone else to get query advice. It's useful for online forums, Stack Exchange, and the like.
After you paste the plan, you've got a new AI Suggestions tab. It sends your query plan (and my custom prompt) up to ChatGPT 5.3, and in 30 seconds or less, you get a second opinion on ways to make it go faster:
My tripod is probably never gonna recover from the salt water, but the water was so nice that I couldn't resist. This is a 360 video, so you can grab the screen and move it around to see Magens Bay in St Thomas, US Virgin Islands, as I go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
Let's start with a 7-minute demo video - I didn't edit this down because I want you to be able to see what happens in real time. In this video, I point the desktop version of Claude Code at a Github issue for the First Responder Kit and tell it to do the needful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI0EscPWYKs
The official Azure SQL Dev's Corner blog recently wrote about how to enable soft deletes in Azure SQL using row-level security, and it's a nice, clean, short tutorial. I like posts like that because the feature is pretty cool and accomplishes a real business goal. It's always tough deciding where to draw the line on how much to include in a blog post, so I forgive them for not including one vital caveat with this feature.
