I've got a special treat for you today! I was cleaning out my garage and you'll never guess what I found!
That's right: it's an original SQL Server debugger console!
I'm back at the People's Park in Zhengzhou, Yves' hometown, watching retirees be active while I lounge around and take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
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When the new MiniMax H3 image-to-video model dropped this month, I was really impressed with how quickly and easily it was able to make 5-10 second videos from a starting image - not in the cloud, mind you, but on my own home computer gear:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Dbl8udOEq_d/
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. There are a lot of conflicting opinions out there about how to set it, and Microsoft has official guidance about it in that article above. It's basically set…
Common Table Expressions are awesome because they let SQL Server reorder processing in whatever way it deems to be the most efficient for your current data distribution, on your current version of SQL Server. Default to CTEs.
When SQL Server gets that process wrong, switch to temp tables.
Today I'm hanging out in the dining room, or what would normally be a dining room, but we use it to store a 1992 Honda Beat. I explain why, and then take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. The audio on this one is a little tinny - the room is super-echo-y and I don't think the camera picked up my lapel microphone. Sorry about that!
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. When you're only handling…
Is your company hiring for a database position as of August 2026? Do you wanna work with the kinds of people who read this blog? Let's make a love connection.
If your company is hiring, leave a comment. The rules:
Every SQL Server performance tuner eventually faces the same question: is this normal, or is something wrong?
The answer starts with 3 numbers about your SQL Server:
I'm in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area today, hanging out in the triple-digit heat, to answer your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
Prefer listening to this via podcast? Good news! You can now subscribe to Office Hours on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Podcast Index, Podcast Addict, Podchaser, and anywhere else fine podcasts are sold.
Over the past couple of years, I've been using the bejeezus out of AI. I don't really feel like an expert by any means - it's so hard to keep up with the advancements - but I've been enjoying reading Grant Fritchey's series on building stuff with AI, and I thought you might enjoy some of my lessons learned as well.
So your company read my post about 5 reasons you should hire Richie Rump, and you checked out his web site and his LinkedIn. Now, your HR department wants to do a reference check with me. Alright, let's get it over with!
Would you hire him again?
Got a few minutes? Close that dating app and pay attention.
Check out this little SQL swipe quiz: "Well, Actually..."
This week's top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento finds us opening ChatGPT multiple times! It's fun to show how I use it, and what it thinks of me.
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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.
Before you watch the below animation, you'll wanna get up to speed with how index seeks work. Then, let's explain page splits with an animation:
For this month's T-SQL Tuesday, I invited y'all to tell me how you know a query's gonna be bad when you open it. Riccardo Perico and Shane O'Neill says WHILE loops and/or CURSORs are pretty good indicators. I agree, because especially when you're opening code in the year 2026, and someone still hasn't figured this out…
This isn't specifically database-related, but it's the kind of thing I'm really into, so maybe you're into it too.
I sat down with Giovana Carvalho, the Managing Director at Teachable, the e-commerce platform I use to sell training classes, and we chatted about what AI is good for these days, and where its rough edges are.
In my free How to Think Like the Engine class, I gloss over the entire concept of B-trees and just hand-wavily say "SQL Server can seek to the page that has the row you're looking for." That's always kinda bothered me, so I finally gave in to temptation and whipped up an animated example of a clustered index on the Users table:
I was in Rome to attend a teaching conference, and my AirBnB had the most beautiful view overlooking Rome and Vatican City. While having my morning coffee, I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento - and I didn't go through many questions because some of them required really long answers, and I had a great time with those.
From now on, I'm going to be releasing annual versions of the First Responder Kit, starting with this one, which I'm calling the First Responder Kit 2026. I'll still release more frequently on Github, but I won't be blogging about it here. I want to make it easier for folks who don't update that often.…
