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.
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:
I get a lot of emails like this:
Hi! I built an app. Can you take a look at it, give me your feedback, and then help get the word out to your readers?
When there are IF branches or conditional logic, "Edit Query Text" only shows you the branches that actually executed. It's easy to miss whole swaths of code that didn't happen to execute one particular time.
To demo it, let's create a simple stored procedure with an IF branch that sometimes executes, and sometimes doesn't:
In theory, SQL Server performance monitoring is pretty simple:
Review the server's top wait types
Find the queries causing those wait types
Fix those queries, or improve the way the server reacts to them (indexes, settings, etc.)
I asked y'all to make the comments on this post look like my ChatGPT history, and y'all understood the assignment. The answers were all over the place from accurate to humorous. Here are the 5 runners-up first, each of whom won a Fundamentals Bundle for themselves or someone they love, since many of these folks already had a Fundamentals membership:
I flew into Wales a couple days early to get used to the time zones, and showed up at the conference center where SQLBits would be located. Let's go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento on a very chilly morning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XjBwH7NzfA
It's time for our quarterly update of our SQL ConstantCare® population report, showing how quickly (or slowly) folks adopt new versions of SQL Server. There were only slight 1-2% shifts, nothing big:
SQL Server 2025: 1%
SQL Server 2022: 31%, up 2% from last quarter
SQL Server 2019: 42%, down 1%
SQL Server 2017: 9%, no change
SQL Server 2016: 9%, down 1%
SQL Server 2014 & prior: 6%, no change
Azure SQL DB and Managed Instances: 2%, no change
When you turn on last actual plans in SQL Server 2019 and newer:
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This week at the SQLBits conference in Newport, I'm teaching an all-new all-day session called Dev-Prod Demon Hunters: Finding the Real Cause of Production Slowness.
It filled up initially, but they've opened up more seats for it, so if you're interested, there's still time to join! Attendees get a free Fundamentals & Mastering 1-Year Bundle. Register now for SQLBits, or if you're already registered, email contactus@sqlbits.com to get into my workshop.
When you've got questions about architecture, development, or best practices, post 'em at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, and upvote the ones you'd like to see me cover. It's like free bite-sized consulting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCbPSYmCTHg
If there was ever a release you should skip for reliability reasons, it's this one. There's a lot of AI-edited code in here. I'm really only putting it out there because I want to let early adopters start playing around with a few new things: sp_BlitzIndex adds an @AI parameter to get index consolidation advice…
On July 14, 2026, Microsoft's extended support ends for SQL Server 2016.
They will offer Extended Security Updates that you can buy for 3 more years, either through Azure or your licensing partner. The price is stunning:
Need to share an execution plan, like on forums or on Stack Overflow, and you wanna get their advice as quickly as possible? Paste the XML into PasteThePlan.com and you get a link that you can share to anyone with your plan's details.
The user interface is now cleaner, with separate tabs for query plan, query text, AI suggestions, raw XML, and your recent plans:
Let's go through a LOT of your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento on a VERY early Saturday morning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7lGcm8CyEM
Let's have some fun.
Put yourself in the frame of mind of the fella who writes this blog.
The short answer: in the real world, only the first column works. When SQL Server needs data about the second column, it builds its own stats on that column instead (assuming they don't already exist), and uses those two statistics together - but they're not really correlated.
For the longer answer, let's take a large version of the Stack Overflow database, create a two-column index on the Users table, and then view the resulting statistics:
Is your company hiring for a database position as of April 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:
