Category: SQL Server

If you've been following along with this week's posts on DATETRUNC and STRING_SPLIT, you're probably going to think the answer is no, but bear with me. It's Christmas week, right? The news can't all be bad.

GREATEST and LEAST are kinda like MAX and MIN, but instead of taking multiple rows as input, they take multiple columns. For example:
[crayon-6a44415b5489c138057175/]
Produces 3 and 1. This actually has really useful real-world implications.

Today at the PASS Data Community Summit in Seattle, Kimberly Tripp is doing the first-ever in-person community keynote. Here's the abstract: Over the 30+ years I’ve been working with SQL Server, I’ve seen an incredible amount of innovation and change. How do we keep up with so many changes and how do we know how…

This week, a lot of the questions you posted at https://pollgab.com/room/brento just need pointers to resources at other places. Welcome to the Read This, Watch This series of answers.

Don't Blame Anthony: Our developers prefer writing TSQL queries directly in their .NET code rather than writing sprocs and calling them. What are the pros / cons to this approach?

Sometimes the exact same query goes slow out of nowhere. Your current fix is to update statistics, rebuild indexes, or restart the SQL Server. It works, but you don’t know why.

The single most common reason is parameter sniffing. SQL Server "sniffs" the first set of parameters for a query, builds an execution plan for it, and then reuses that same plan no matter what parameters get called. It’s been the bane of our performance tuning for decades.

If you want to get a look at where Microsoft SQL Server is heading in the future, it helps to get an idea of what users are repeatedly asking for. Here's a quick rundown of the top requests from feedback.azure.com as voted by the people who cared enough to log in and upvote 'em:

When this feature was announced in 2018, I wrote: <sarcasm> It’s like linked servers, but since they don’t perform well, we need to scale out across containers. </sarcasm> I just didn't get it, and I continued: I like that Microsoft is making a risky bet, planting a flag where nobody else is, saying, “We’re going…

I think of my blog posts in a few different categories:

Posts that will only be read at the moment they're published (like upcoming webcasts, humorous stuff, and career advice)
Posts that will show up in search history over time and continue to be evergreen (like how a feature works)
Posts that provoke discussion and interactivity (like asking you a question or running a contest)

Now that Microsoft has announced that SQL Server 2022 is coming, it's time for us to talk about a shameful truth:

SQL Server doesn't sell itself.

Earlier this year, we opened up training class sales to the EU and UK. Now, we're taking it to the next level: my monitoring service SQL ConstantCare® is available in the EU and UK, too! With SQL ConstantCare®, you install an app on your desktop that checks in with your SQL Servers once a day, sends…