Over the last several years, Microsoft has been putting less and less effort into Cumulative Update documentation. We used to get full-blown knowledge base articles about fixes, but these days, we get a collection of footnotes with deceiving hyperlinks that look like they're going to lead to more information - but they simply lead back to themselves.
You're looking at a wide table with 100-200 columns.
Years ago, it started as a "normal" table with maybe 10-20, but over the years, people kept gradually adding one column after another. Now, this behemoth is causing you problems because:
Meet my latest toy, a 1991 Honda Beat! I introduce it, then take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkeEKyzc01M
I certainly don't discuss it often, and it's been a few years since I wrote about my pansexuality. I hope you'll forgive me for talking a little about it today. I promise not to make it a habit. A friend of mine recently asked me privately, "Why would people ever talk about their sexuality publicly?…
I took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento and answered 'em from my balcony at Disney's Aulani Resort in Hawaii. I'm not really a Disney guy - we were there for a friend's birthday celebration - but I tell ya what, that's my new favorite resort in the world. The water park, food, beach, and nearby activities were great, and it has the awesome Disney service. Top notch. Anyhoo, back to tech:
I'm coming to Jacksonville, FL on May 2-3 and Raleigh, NC on May 16-17 for SQL Saturdays! In each city, I'm teaching a one-day pre-conference workshop on Friday.
Jacksonville Pre-Conference Workshop:
Mastering Query Tuning
Last week I wrote about the 6 best things Microsoft ever did to SQL Server, but now we gotta pull up a chair and discuss the stinkers. To be fair, I excluded anything that's basically ANSI standard. I'm sorry that you don't like functions and cursors, but the reality is that Microsoft adds that stuff…
Every quarter, we publish adoption rate data showing how quickly people are adopting new versions of SQL Server. Today it's time for the winter 2025 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report.
SQL Server 2022 is finally seeing some good adoption with about 21% of the market. It's gradually taking market share from all other versions, including 2019, but 2019 still dominates with 44% of the market:
Is your company hiring for a database position as of February 2025? Do you wanna work with the kinds of people who read this blog? Let's set up some rapid networking here.
If your company is hiring, leave a comment. The rules:
This entire blog post is driven by the #1 feature in this list. I think about the #1 feature a lot, like at least once a week. I think about it so much that I had to stop and think about what other similar great things Microsoft has done over the years, and be thankful for what a nice platform this is to work with. Let's go through 6 of my favorite Microsoft decisions.
I originally took these questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento poolside at the Trixie Motel (really), but I forgot to use the good microphone, so I re-recorded 'em from my home studio when I got back:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8booXqUYY-Y
Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR) is a database-level feature that makes transaction rollbacks nearly instantaneous. Here's how it works.
Without ADR, when you update a row, SQL Server copies the old values into the transaction log and updates the row in-place. If you roll that transaction back, SQL Server has to fetch the old values from the transaction log, then apply them to the row in-place. The more rows you've affected, the longer your transaction will take.
Let's get a little nerdy and look at database internals. Create two tables: one with a million unique values, and one with a million identical values:
[crayon-6a36456b050c3555058587/]
I took 5 of your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento while hanging out in the backyard on my second gin & tonic. I, uh, might have lost my temper on the last one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TrOic3w4WE
When I see horrific code, stuff that would take a lot of manual labor to fix, I like to lob it over to an LLM like ChatGPT just to see how it does.
For example, on a call with a client, I opened up one of their slowest pieces of code to find that it was running a cursor, processing data row by row rather than working in sets. To simulate it, I've written up a few stored procedures against the Stack Overflow database:
A few things lined up perfectly for a European trip this summer. I'm on a European cruise in early June, then Data Saturday Croatia on June 14, and then SQL Bits on June 21.
For Croatia, I'm teaching a one-day preconference workshop: Faster, Cheaper Cloud Databases.
I've already explained that no, it doesn't make your database server more reliable - and in fact, it's the exact opposite. But what about performance? The answer is going to depend on your hardware and workload, but let's work through an example. I'll take the first lab workload from the Mastering Server Tuning class and…
We've been running our annual Data Professional Salary Survey for almost a decade, and I was really curious to see what the results would hold this year. How would inflation and layoffs impact the database world? Download the raw data here and slice & dice it to see what’s important to you. Here's what I found.
Today's questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento require a little bit longer answers:
https://youtu.be/W-HKNMh8JQE
Most of the time, I love Entity Framework, and ORMs in general. These tools make it easier for companies to ship applications. Are the apps perfect? Of course not - but they're good enough to get to market, bring in revenue to pay salaries, and move a company forwards.
However, just like any tool, if you don't know how to use it, you're gonna get hurt.
