99.9% of you are never gonna need this.
But let's say you need to run queries with leading (not trailing) wildcards, like this search for all the different national versions of the Encabulator, each of which has different prefixes depending on which government it's being sold to:
Wanna hear about my worst job interviews? I drove up to 8,000 feet where it's 30 degrees colder than Las Vegas to bring you these answers to your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. The audio's a little odd on here because it was really windy, and I had to use noise reduction in post-production.
Last week, I asked if your database administrators could read all of the data in all databases. The results (which may be different from this post, because I'm writing the post ahead of time and the poll is still open):
Yes: 61%
When I'm tuning queries, the normal answer is to make the query perform better - either via changing the T-SQL, adding hints, or adding indexes so that the data's better prepared for the query.
However, sometimes when I'm looking at the output of sp_BlitzCache, I scroll across to the Average Rows column and double-check that the query's actually returning a reasonable number of rows out in the wild.
You've got a good job, and some spare time. You're thinking about giving back to the community by blogging, presenting, live streaming, or working on Github projects - and you'd like to make your next job search easier. Let's talk about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ3TuMM4cEQ
It's a simple question: can your database administrators read all of the data in all databases? Yes Yes, but we trust them not to - as in, we've got written policies in place, and they know they're not supposed to go poking around in the payroll tables or the human resources database Yes, if they…
Your company doesn't want to send you off to conferences or training classes in other cities.
You've looked around locally, but the local options seem to be irrelevant to your needs. It's generic stuff like how to pass certification classes, or boot camps to get your first DBA job.
I've been pretty vocal here on the blog and on social media about the reliability problems with Microsoft Fabric. Today, I've got good news: Microsoft released a new Fabric status page and a known issues page, something that really does take guts given the current reliability situation. The status page still appears to be manually updated, not automated, but at least it acknowledges outages like how SQL endpoints are currently returning incorrect query results:
Let's hang out, listen to the peaceful waterfall, and go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. This is kinda the calm before the storm: in another week, I'll be on the road again for a while, hopefully bringing you some fresh Office Hours locations from the Caribbean and Alaska!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdBa7FKQMWI
In this quarter's update of our SQL ConstantCare® population report, showing how quickly (or slowly) folks adopt new versions of SQL Server, the data is very similar to last quarter. SQL Server 2019 still rules the market:
SQL Server 2022: 24%, up from 21% last quarter
SQL Server 2019: 45%, was 44%
SQL Server 2017: 11%, was 12%
SQL Server 2016: 12%, was 15%
SQL Server 2014: 5%, was 4%
SQL Server 2012 & prior: 1%, same
Azure SQL DB and Managed Instances: 2%, same
I'mma wax philosophical for a second: I love the open source nature of the First Responder Kit because it lets anybody, anywhere, diagnose database problems faster. If you're a full time employee somewhere today, you owe it to yourself to use the FRK scripts because if you ever switch from one company to another, your…
I'm finally back in the home office after running around Europe for a month. Let's talk through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl-QQEFkBVg
There was an interesting post on Reddit yesterday asking what DBA jobs are like these days. Here's a snippet of the most important part: Our friend works for maybe 15 hours a week, on call for maybe 40 but is always running around not in front of his computer. She works odd hours, takes the…
You know how you put "https://" at the beginning of web site addresses, and your browser can magically talk to all kinds of web servers, all over the world? Well, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standard for AI stuff to talk to other things. It's like http for AI. It's less than a…
One of my readers asked me to give a 30-minute talk to their company's internal employees discussing the job market at large. The target audience was technical people of all disciplines - not just database administrators, but all kinds of people who worked with technology.
My goal with the talk was to help people think about lots of possible next-steps in their career journey. I wanted to show how the skills they've already developed might be useful in jobs they hadn't thought about before.
As the SQL Server 2025 previews continue to come out, Microsoft is making changes that they're not telling you about. Sometimes these changes never actually go into the final production version, other times they're held exclusively for the cloud, but sometimes - just sometimes - we get a sneak peek of something Microsoft hasn't announced…
I've posted a couple of updated videos to my Mastering courses.
In Mastering Server Tuning, I updated and expanded the RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE module to cover more details about query workspace grants, plus cover SQL Server 2022's updates to Adaptive Memory Grants.
When I'm on the road, I try to take you along with me to glamorous or scenic locations to give you a change of pace. However, last week in London was a bit of a whirlwind between SQLBits and restaurants, so at the last minute, I recorded Office Hours in my hotel room!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8lURbMoKzk
Last week, I asked y'all how frequently you ran your full backups, corruption checks, index maintenance, and stats updates. The results after over 1,000 responses:
A few thoughts:
It's official: SQL Server 2022 was the last release for SSRS.
At SQLBits this week, Microsoft announced that SQL Server 2025 won't include SSRS.
