SQL Server

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…

One of my favorite uses for AI is to ask it to explain a concept using wildly unusual points of view. Well, we’re going to be seeing various family members and friends for the holidays, and we’ll get endless questions of, “So, what is it that you do?” I figured ChatGPT would be the perfect…

Your app is happily humming along on SQL Server Standard Edition. Things are quiet – too quiet. You’re wondering what you’re missing, and whether you should be on SQL Server Enterprise Edition. Here are 3 warning signs to watch out for. Developers say, “Any downtime is unacceptable.” Sure, everybody loves to say that before they…

I’m in Seattle this week for the PASS Data Community Summit. Before the pre-conference sessions started, I sat down to take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Office Hours at the PASS Summit in SeattleWatch this video on YouTube Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 02:29 MyTeaGotCold: How are you finding DbBeaver for Microsoft SQL Server?…

Every year, Stack Overflow runs a developer survey about technology, work, community, and more. This year’s results include 65,437 responses from developers around the world. The results are biased towards the kinds of developers who use Stack Overflow – 76% of the respondents reported that they have a Stack Overflow account. I would guess that…

The short story: SQL Server 2019 continues its utter domination of the Microsoft data platform landscape this quarter. The long story: ever wonder how fast people are adopting new versions of SQL Server, or what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates? Let’s find out in the winter 2023 version of our SQL ConstantCare®…

At least once a month, a client has The Postgres Conversation™ with me. It happens at the end of a consulting engagement, after we’ve talked about the work that the team needs to do in order to meet their performance objectives. A manager who’s been quiet the whole meeting suddenly pipes up and quietly says,…

Sometimes when people post questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, the answer is just a link, nothing more, nothing less. It doesn’t make sense for me to rehash something that’s been covered really well online, and I want to link ’em to the best resource possible. Petr: Huge slowdown of basic queries when using a partitioned table (Partition_Key…

Hey, you! You look smart. Here are highly-upvoted questions that fellow readers submitted at https://pollgab.com/room/brento that I don’t have answers for. If you’d like to jump into the comments, you can reference questions by number with your answers. Time to show off your brains! Kansas4444 asks: Hi Brent, do you have any advice on calculating…

While on a road trip, Richie stopped by a used bookstore (or would that be used book store?) and made an amusing observation about the relative value of different SQL Server books. I just had to go look at Amazon for some research. I’m listing prices below, but keep in mind that when you click,…

<sigh> Okay, so, the last few Cumulative Updates have had known issues around broken remote queries using the generic ODBC connector and errors with contained availability groups, but I couldn’t really care less about those. If you use those features, I give you bombastic side eye anyway. However, in the last few days, two more…

Twenty years ago this month (next Wednesday to be exact), sysadmins and database administrators started noticing extremely high network traffic related to problems with their SQL Servers. The SQL Slammer worm was infecting Microsoft SQL Servers. Microsoft had known about it and patched the problem 6 months earlier, but people just weren’t patching SQL Server. There…