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Category: Database Animations

Performance Tuning

Database Animations: Stop Using Page Splits to Justify Lowering Fill Factor.

September 22, 2026

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You're looking at page split numbers in a monitoring tool or Perfmon, and you've heard that page splits are bad, so you're lowering fill factor, expecting your page splits to go down.

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Performance Tuning

Database Animations: How SQL Server’s JSON Indexes Work

September 9, 2026

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By popular demand, SQL Server 2025 added JSON indexes. You can eat the cake of being able to store practically schema-less JSON blobs as part of each row, and have it too by querying specific values quickly.

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Performance Tuning

Database Animations: The Interview Question Everybody Gets Wrong

September 3, 2026

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No no, I'm not just talking about the people answering the interview question.

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Performance Tuning

Database Animations: What’s a Residual Predicate and Why Is It Bad?

August 27, 2026

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Normally when you're looking at an execution plan, and you see an index seek followed by a key lookup, that means it's running relatively quickly.

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Performance Tuning

Database Animations: The Difference Between Row Compression and Page Compression

August 19, 2026

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What's the difference between SQL Server's row compression and page compression, and when does each one make sense?

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Database Animations: Why Higher Maxdop Equals More TempDB Spills

August 12, 2026

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You've probably heard of the setting Max Degree of Parallelism. I hate that name: it should really be called just plain ol' Degrees of Parallelism, and here's why.

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T-SQL & Development

Database Animations: Why Big Columns May Not Affect Logical Reads

August 6, 2026

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Over the years, tables - like your waistline - tend to get bigger. We keep tacking on more and more columns, one at a time, in order to handle app needs. It's easier to add "just one more column" than it is to break things off into a whole separate table.

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Database Animations: You’ve Heard of Page Splits. Here’s What They Really Mean.

July 22, 2026

Your queries won’t tune themselves. My 2027 Live Class Season Pass is $995 (normally $4,395), with live Fundamentals and Mastering classes plus recordings. Register by October 31 to join Fundamentals Week, November 2–6. See the pass.

You've heard that page splits are bad, and they're an indication that your table design is making your storage work too hard. You've heard that the right answer to fix it is adjusting fill factor lower, or doing regular index maintenance.

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