I'm finally back in the home office after running around Europe for a month. Let's talk through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl-QQEFkBVg
There was an interesting post on Reddit yesterday asking what DBA jobs are like these days. Here's a snippet of the most important part: Our friend works for maybe 15 hours a week, on call for maybe 40 but is always running around not in front of his computer. She works odd hours, takes the…
You know how you put "https://" at the beginning of web site addresses, and your browser can magically talk to all kinds of web servers, all over the world? Well, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standard for AI stuff to talk to other things. It's like http for AI. It's less than a…
One of my readers asked me to give a 30-minute talk to their company's internal employees discussing the job market at large. The target audience was technical people of all disciplines - not just database administrators, but all kinds of people who worked with technology.
My goal with the talk was to help people think about lots of possible next-steps in their career journey. I wanted to show how the skills they've already developed might be useful in jobs they hadn't thought about before.
As the SQL Server 2025 previews continue to come out, Microsoft is making changes that they're not telling you about. Sometimes these changes never actually go into the final production version, other times they're held exclusively for the cloud, but sometimes - just sometimes - we get a sneak peek of something Microsoft hasn't announced…
I've posted a couple of updated videos to my Mastering courses.
In Mastering Server Tuning, I updated and expanded the RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE module to cover more details about query workspace grants, plus cover SQL Server 2022's updates to Adaptive Memory Grants.
When I'm on the road, I try to take you along with me to glamorous or scenic locations to give you a change of pace. However, last week in London was a bit of a whirlwind between SQLBits and restaurants, so at the last minute, I recorded Office Hours in my hotel room!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8lURbMoKzk
Last week, I asked y'all how frequently you ran your full backups, corruption checks, index maintenance, and stats updates. The results after over 1,000 responses:
A few thoughts:
It's official: SQL Server 2022 was the last release for SSRS.
At SQLBits this week, Microsoft announced that SQL Server 2025 won't include SSRS.
I'm on a Med cruise, and I stopped the boat today in Corsica to make sure your questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento got the answers they deserve. I started by mentioning that I'm using a 360 degree camera, but the file size on that video was so huge that I couldn't upload it from the cruise ship, so you just get the 180 version.
How often do you run backups, corruption checking, index maintenance, and statistics updates?
Click here to take the anonymous poll.
I've always wanted to see the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe, and by happy coincidence, I ended up walking right past it while visiting Barcelona! It's one of the most important beginnings of modern architecture, and I loved it. I brought you along with me and talked through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
In your most recent Query Exercise challenge, I gave you these two tables:
[crayon-6af577bd23c42332780581/]
I'm in the Detroit airport today, en route home after a client gig. I've got some time to kill, so let's go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yd59N2bWzQ
I'mma be honest with you, dear reader: this query exercise stems from a client problem that I couldn't figure out how to solve in the time constraints that I had, and it drove me crazy. I wanted to put hours into this to figure it out, and I was sure there'd be a fun T-SQL way to do it.
While recovering from a nasty cold, I took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et1mNyC1lIk
I use AI tools constantly in my work, so when the new SSMS v21 came out with Copilot support, I was excited to try it. The short story is that the user interface is fine, and it doesn't feel buggy, but the advice is simply terrible compared to other LLMs due to the prompt Copilot is using. You're better off using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude directly for now.
About three years ago, SQL Server 2022 introduced Parameter-Sensitive Plan Optimization (PSPO). At the time, I explained that it didn't work particularly well, and went so far as to pronounce PSPO in a rather unflattering way. I wouldn't suggest that anyone turn it off - it's fine, just fine - but it isn't powerful enough, and poses serious challenges for monitoring and plan cache analysis.
Several years ago, I wrote a post about how I configure older versions of SQL Server Management Studio, but now that SSMS v21 is out, it's time to revisit that post. SSMS v21 is built on the Visual Studio shell, so it's got a lot of cool new tricks. Let's make sure you're using 'em.
The first public preview of SQL Server 2025 dropped yesterday, and here's what's new under the hood as compared to today's SQL Server 2022 CU19. Forgive me - this is quite a lengthy post, and it's mostly a data dump. There are new stored procedures, extended stored procs, views, feature switches, new columns in existing tables, messages, and more.
