The lineup for the PASS Data Community Summit Seattle event was just released,and I'm proud to share that I'll be teaching my new all-day pre-conference workshop.
Dev-Prod Demon Hunters:
Finding the Real Cause of Production Slowness
Production is slow. Development is fast. The same query runs in both. Somewhere between the two, a performance demon is hiding—and this session is about hunting it down.
About ten years ago, I sketched out an idea for a different kind of SQL Server monitoring tool: one that gathered data just once per day, and gave you a short email with a specific list of actionable tasks to make a difference in health and performance. Richie Rump did an amazing job of building…
I'm at sea again, this time cruising aboard the Disney Treasure off of St. Thomas. Let's go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLrcSGUx2lY
Normally when I tell people about SQL Server's optimistic concurrency isolation levels, Read Committed Snapshot Isolation (RCSI) and Snapshot Isolation (SI), I have to give them a little speech about how they need to test their queries because the results can change. Recently, though, I was working with a client who was getting the wrong query…
For T-SQL Tuesday #199, Koen Verbeeck posed an excellent question: if your company moved up to the cloud, but after migrating, had to come back on-premises, what would be the big problems?
I've had clients in this exact situation! Here are some of my favorite gotchas from those experiences.
I'm back in the home office to take another round of the top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdQiRbYr500
For T-SQL Tuesday #100, Adam Machanic's challenge for SQL bloggers was to predict what databases would be like 100 months from then.
Well, guess what: that's coming up this July!
Is your company hiring for a database position as of June 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:
In this live stream recording, I'll show you how to use the latest features of sp_BlitzCache to rapidly improve performance on an existing server. I'll show you how to find your server's top bottleneck, find the queries causing that bottleneck, and then demonstrate how to get advice from AI on how to tune them in seconds.
You might notice that the advice you get from Copilot in SSMS isn't very good, but it isn't necessarily AI in general. Part of the problem is something specific about SSMS Copilot and the way it prompts LLMs, and I wish I could tell you exactly what it is, but I can't because I don't have access to how SSMS is changing your prompts.
You were minding your own business, and all of a sudden it happened.
You glanced at file sizes one day, and your eyes got big. The numbers got a little large while you weren't looking. This is a great time to stop and think about a few changes to the way you're managing this database.
In this 76-minute session, I'll show you how to use the latest features of sp_BlitzIndex to rapidly improve performance on an existing database. I'll show you how to figure out quickly if you've got too many indexes or not enough, and then demonstrate how to get advice from AI on how to consolidate them in seconds.
Can I be honest with you for a second?
It makes my skin crawl when I hear database people smugly answer a question with "It depends!"
If you do a lot of query tuning, you've probably come across Richie Rump's StatisticsParser.com. Now, it's even easier to use.
Now, it's even easier to use. Download & install it, then run your query with SET STATISTICS IO, TIME ON, and after it finishes, right-click in the query window and click Parse Statistics:
Our cruise ship pulled into port in Victoria, Canada, so before we head out to the Butchart Gardens, let's go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDTuQFiXo2s
I love me some documentation.
For years, I've pointed folks to the SQL Server 2008 documentation on Forced Parameterization, a really useful tool for reducing plan cache bloat, getting more accurate reusable query plans, and enabling SQL Server 2019 and 2022's Intelligent Query Plan features, many of which rely on the same query text coming in repeatedly over time in order to tune it. That documentation was pretty sparse, though.
At least once a month, I get this question from a client:
We have big data, and we want to save money. We want to move the older data down to some kind of archives that will cost us less.
Times and tech are changing quickly. Let's get you up to speed on the latest developments to do your work more quickly with a series of free live webcasts. How to Tune Indexes Faster - May 12 & 18 - Brent Ozar will show you how to use the latest features of sp_BlitzIndex to rapidly…
Is your company hiring for a database position as of May 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:
When a query is sometimes fast and sometimes slow, there are a lot of ways you can reduce the effects of parameter sniffing. We're always going to have parameter sniffing in SQL Server and Azure SQL DB - it's just the way the product is built - but there are a lot of options to reduce the blast radius.
