Humor

April 1, 2026: Big news for everyone who has to manage Microsoft SQL Server, whether they’re DBAs, sysadmins, or developers. Seven years ago, Microsoft announced automatic, downtime-free hot patching of the SQL Server engine in Azure SQL DB. The tail end of that post had a teaser in it: Well, I guess enough of you…

Here’s a homework challenge:

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…

So many times in my career, I’ve come across a questionable query, table design, or server configuration decision, and I just wanted to reach out to The Last Person™ to find out what the hell they were thinking. Now, with ChatGPT, I can. Here’s the prompt: I want you to act as a Microsoft SQL…

On social media, I asked folks, “Why haven’t you disabled the SA account in your SQL Servers? Wrong answers only.” The results were pretty funny: “I went a step further and also created an account called ‘as’. Now my boss keeps bragging to his golf buddies that we run our database fully SaaS.” – Hugo…

Step 1: go into Tools, Options and set this: Step 2, set this: Step 3, check this box: And presto, no one will ever again question whether or not you know what you’re doing.

Documenting your database and code is such a pain in the rear. Wouldn’t it be awesome if artificial intelligence could help? Good news! There are a bunch of AI systems like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E that will draw things based on your text prompts. Forget the slow, tedious task of sketching out the relationships between your…

You don’t follow me on Twitter because you’re not on Twitter, and I can’t say that I blame you. It’s a bunch of people yelling at each other. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure why *I’m* on there. But anyway, here are a few things I’ve said on there lately that you’ll…

Last week, over 600 of y’all captioned this picture, and we had a lot of laughs: My favorite caption overall was from Aart Bluestoke, who won a Live Class Season Pass for this: The funniest part to me was that I’ve had that exact experience several times with several different data type combinations, and I think…

When Microsoft brought out Query Store, they wrote: Similar to an airplane’s flight data recorder, Query Store collects and presents detailed historic information about all queries, greatly simplifying performance forensics by reducing the time to diagnose and resolve issues. I have a straight face under here, for real It certainly works, making it easier for…

I asked a two-part question on Twitter: if you could only remove one feature from SQL, why would it be cursors? If you could only remove one feature from SQL, why would it be cursors? — Brent Ozar (@BrentO) January 20, 2021 The responses were great: Auto-shrink does not agree — Warner Chaves (@warchav) January…

Familiar readers will know that I don’t actually do New Music Friday here very often. Okay, ever. I don’t do it ever. Because frankly, nobody writes music about us. Nobody except Homer McEwen, aka Killa DBA (YouTube – @KillaDBA). You may remember him from The SQL Server 2017 Song, and if not, you should go…

One of my favorite memes is Wrong Answers Only, where you show something and people have to answer incorrectly, like this and this and this. So now it’s your turn: you’re in SSMS, you right-click on a database, and go into Tasks: What does that bottom right task do? Wrong answers only.

Adrian Sullivan and Michael J. Swart have way too much time on their hands, because Adrian just posted this T-SQL gist, which draws … me: It uses the spatial results feature in SSMS. My mind is blown. I’m totally going to use that in a demo. Thanks, Adrian! I’m already envisioning all kinds of crazy…

Last week, I asked for your worst database horror stories. Hoowee, did you deliver. Make yourself a nice cup of cocoa, gather around the campfire, and listen up for these terrible tales. Illustrations courtesy of Swear Trek (not safe for work.) The mistake we’ve all made Russ did an update without a where clause, but…

At SQL Intersection in Orlando last week, a few of us were sitting around a table talking shop. One thing led to another, and as so often happens at conferences, we started talking about our worst scars from database misfortunes. That got me thinking – I could kinda bring that fun experience to y’all here…