Update 2025/07/21: Microsoft heard the complaints, and fixed the reliability added a better status page. Baby steps.
Last week, Microsoft Fabric went down yet again for hours on multiple continents.
Dam! I took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento without making any dam or beaver puns. Rather proud of myself for that one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUqIJtps8Y4
Most of the time, we use wait stats to identify SQL Server's bottleneck and focus on what to tune.
However, let's say you've got a really well-tuned SQL Server where:
SQL ConstantCare™, our monitoring app that gives you a simple daily email with actionable tasks to make your servers faster and more reliable, is about to start sending out monthly awards! On the first weekday of each month, we'll email the winners with their gold, silver, and bronze badges.
Well, I say badges - some of them are badges of pride and honor, but some are badges of... well, let's just say you'll laugh when you'll put them on the company fridge.
Not all of y'all's questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento require long, thought-out answers. Let's do a speed round:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqNE31oR3bY
We're heading towards graduation time.
In just a few short months, your high school kids are going to be packing up their bags and heading off to college. It's a time of adventure and discovery, and the first time they'll be away from your parenting and guiding influences.
I strapped on my Apple Vision Pro, updated its OS, and recaptured my persona with the latest updates, and... it's still pretty weird. Let's go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento and have a laugh at my hot dog fingers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLAEqItBnuI
For yeeeeeears, when I've explained execution plans, part of my explanation has included the instructions, "Read the plan from right to left, top to bottom, looking for the place where the estimates vs actuals are suddenly way off." Here's an example:
Things seem to be going okay on the query plan until you hit the key lookup, which brought back 13 rows of an estimated 19,452. That would appear to be a pretty doggone bad estimate.
On a nice sunny Saturday, I took the 911 around the Las Vegas canyons, and stopped to answer your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja90e234rIo
No, that isn't an April 1st joke, heh. I know a lot of vendors are shoving AI down your throat, but I can think of a few ways I actually want to get quick, easy advice from large language models (LLM) when I'm calling the sp_Blitz scripts: sp_BlitzCache will have an @AskAI parameter that sends the…
On a sunny Saturday afternoon, I made myself a highball and went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NLtbul3Nyc
First things first: pick up that filthy keyboard, take it over to the trash can, turn it upside down, and give it a good, vigorous shake.
Next, go to your biggest SQL Server and run:
This quarter's release contains a few advanced warnings & tools, like table input for sp_BlitzLock, new warnings about paused resumable index operations that will be deleted automatically by SQL Server 2022, and a new option to maintain carriage returns and line feeds in sp_BlitzCache's output.
To get the new version:
Every year, Aaron Bertrand runs a curling tournament up in scenic North Bay where he grew up. I joined in this year, and before the tournament, sat on the shores of Lake Napissing to answer your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://youtu.be/49Ycmorwk_g
One of the things I love about TikTok is that it exposes me to wildly new video ideas like this:
https://www.tiktok.com/@tiipititap/video/7468701529252351262
I'm doing a lot of travel this month, but I took a break in my Vegas backyard to go through the top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://youtu.be/3ez2m-Hev9E
This year's release of Microsoft's enterprise-grade relational database focuses on the most highly requested features from customers. Highlights include:
Tooling support for SSMS like adding the debugger back in and executing the query where your cursor is on
Production DBA enhancements like the ability to restore a single table from backup, and automatic background corruption checks
New investments in SQL Server Reporting Services, like a report viewer for .NET Core
T-SQL enhancements like DISTINCT support in STRING_AGG and enhanced NoSQL support
I'm back home after a 2-week Iceland vacation. Let's catch up with your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV6MuFQkf5k
For this week's Query Exercise, your mission had two parts:
Do a first pass search through the Users table looking for columns where people had snuck in email addresses where they didn't belong
Write a more high-quality query to identify exactly which rows we needed to handle
tl;dr: if you use Azure SQL DB Hyperscale's auto-scaling, it's probably not cutting your bill down because like SQL Server, Hyperscale doesn't automatically relinquish memory, and it'll be up to you to manually manage your own memory if you wanna cut your bill.
Now for the long story.
