Category: 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:

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
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

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 Kornelis

Step 1: go into Tools, Options and set this:

Step 2, set this:

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 tables, and let the machines do the hard work for you.

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.

It certainly works, making it easier for you to understand when a query's execution plan suddenly goes downhill, taking your server with it.

I asked a two-part question on Twitter: if you could only remove one feature from SQL, why would it be cursors?

https://twitter.com/BrentO/status/1351960690316161024

Familiar readers will know that I don't actually do New Music Friday here very often.

Okay, ever. I don't do it ever.

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:

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!

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…

When I was thinking about this site's 17th birthday, I started wondering: back in 2002, what bug might I have been working with in SQL Server?

I started reading back to the list of bugs fixed in SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 1, and it hit me...these bugs aren't all that different than the ones we're facing today.