You're building a new table or adding a column, and you wanna know which datatype to use: VARCHAR or NVARCHAR?
If you need to store Unicode data, the choice is made for you: NVARCHAR says it's gonna be me.
Max Degrees of Parallelism (MAXDOP) tells the database engine, "If you decide to parallelize a query, go parallel with this many worker threads."
(It's a little more complex than that - there is also a coordinating thread, plus a single plan might have multiple parallel zones that each consume MAXDOP worker threads, but for the sake of this blog post, let's keep it simple.)
Last week, I announced that we've hit 50,000 YouTube subscribers, and I celebrated by letting y'all submit your favorite YouTube channels in the comments, and 5 of you would win my Fundamentals & Mastering Class Bundle.
You did not disappoint.
This is kinda amazing to me: our YouTube channel has broken the 50,000 subscriber mark!
That's wild to me because I don't put "please like and subscribe" type stuff in the videos, and I don't try to build viral content. I just show up every week and publish answers to y'all's questions from PollGab. And yet, our subscriber growth is slow and steady over time, growing by about 10% per year:
Somehow I missed this a few years ago, and I bet a lot of y'all did too. Note the new "Recommended" column in the memory settings documentation:
These recommendations are also set by the SQL Server 2022 setup wizard if you choose the recommended settings on the memory step.
In between clients, I hopped onto my Twitch channel to take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. If you'd like to get notified whenever I do one of those live streams, you can follow my channel for free and you'll get email notifications automatically. I do 'em whenever I have time, usually about once a week when I'm at home.
Your developers haven't ever been to formal Microsoft database training on SQL Server or Azure SQL DB.
They're struggling with trying to tune queries and indexes. Your apps keep getting slower as the data grows, and your queries keep getting more complex.
SQL Server 2025 introduces a new sys.dm_os_memory_health_history view to make it easier for meatbags like you and robots like Copilot to know if the SQL Server has been under memory pressure recently.
To show how it works, let's run a bunch of simultaneous high-memory-grant queries in the Stack Overflow database:
In retrospect, I should have put on sunscreen - even for just a 20-minute Office Hours session on the beach! Dang, that sun is powerful. Let's go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. This is a 360-degree video, so if you watch it on YouTube, you'll be able to pan the camera around and take a little virtual vacation with me.
I have never seen a T-SQL feature that people love as much as NOLOCK.
I keep thinking I've written enough blog posts about it, but a client came up with a new one:
Ever wonder what it takes to do this stuff behind the scenes? I'll show you.
If you're thinking about getting started with live streaming or training videos, don't be intimidated by this setup. There's a lot of gear involved, but it's because I've been doing this for years, and I've accumulated a lot of gear that works well for me. You can start with much less gear!
I'm back in Vegas, at least for the moment, so let's hang out in my home office and talk through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. There's a lot of good questions this week!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2lZMHOfbsw
For the last couple of months, I've been trying to get my on-location Office Hours episodes filmed with an Insta360 so you can pan the camera around to see the sights. Folks, I've finally pulled it off! If you watch the video on YouTube (rather than here on the blog), you can move the camera around with your clicker:
Steve Jones recently posted an update about SQL Saturday's status, and it includes some news we need to talk about:
However, this year the number may stagnate or even decline slightly. Running events has become challenging for many communities. Organizers are busy, space is hard to find, and costs are rising.... The biggest challenge in running events is finding space at a reasonable cost. Many Microsoft offices are closing, which were strong supporters of events in the past.
The release of SQL Server 2025 keeps inching closer. Release Candidate 0 is out now, and here are the release notes. If you're planning on replacing your SQL Server 2016 instances (which go out of support next July) with 2025, now would be a good time to start doing functionality testing. As a reminder, here's my post on how to go live on a new SQL Server version.
Software vendors have a wide variety of clients: Some clients don't have any IT staff at all, and just outsource everything. The client wants to hand an installation manual to their contractor and say, "Build whatever the software vendor wants." Some clients have a full time sysadmin or two, and those sysadmins don't really know…
On the last day of my Caribbean cruise, as we pull into port in Miami, let's go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://youtu.be/2tkrh7--2jU
Here's a homework challenge:
When you ask data people how they feel about AI, you get pretty rabid, extreme reactions. People either love it or hate it. Set that aside for a second, and let's zoom out and think about a bigger picture question.
What's it like to work with someone you know, versus a stranger?
The first few questions from this week's crop at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are very much about what-problem-are-you-trying-to-solve, but they get more complex from there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWDUgd_8ZNo
