Indexing and Statistics Archives - Page 2 of 29

T-SQL & Development

Update: SQL Server 2025’s REGEX Performance Isn’t So Bad!

December 10, 2025

Back in March 2025 when Microsoft first announced that REGEX support was coming to SQL Server 2025 and Azure SQL DB, I gave it a quick test, and the performance was horrific. It was bad in 3 different ways:

The CPU usage was terrible, burning 60 seconds of CPU time to check a few million rows
It refused to use an index
The cardinality estimation was terrible, hard-coded to 30% of the table

Functions in the WHERE Clause Are Bad… Right?

November 20, 2025

Nah, not necessarily. SQL Server's query optimizer behavior keeps changing with every freakin' version. Let's illustrate it with a simple query against the Stack Overflow Users table:

[crayon-6a6ece60a97e9636810035/]

How to Query JSON Data Quickly in SQL Server, Part 2: SQL Server 2025

November 12, 2025

SQL Server 2025 and .NET 10 bring several new improvements to storing JSON natively in the database and querying it quickly. On the SQL Server 2025 side, the two big ones are the new native JSON indexes and the new JSON_CONTAINS function. Let's see their improvements in action. On the .NET 10 side, EF 10…

Performance Tuning

How to Query JSON Data Quickly in SQL Server, Part 1: Pre-2025

November 11, 2025

Before SQL Server 2025, if you want to store JSON data in Microsoft SQL Server or Azure SQL DB, and you want fast queries, the easiest way is to:

Store the data in an NVARCHAR(MAX) column (because the native JSON datatype didn't arrive until SQL Server 2025)
Add a computed column for the specific JSON keys we'll want to query quickly
Index those keys
Query it using the JSON_VALUE function

[Video] Office Hours in Roatan, Honduras

November 6, 2025

My cruise ship took a detour to Honduras to avoid the hurricane. Let's hang out on the beach and go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD7FnCRzJL8

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T-SQL & Development

Which Should You Use: VARCHAR or NVARCHAR?

October 1, 2025

You're building a new table or adding a column, and you wanna know which datatype to use: VARCHAR or NVARCHAR?

If you need to store Unicode data, the choice is made for you: NVARCHAR says it's gonna be me.

[Video] Office Hours on the Beach in Cancun

September 11, 2025

In retrospect, I should have put on sunscreen - even for just a 20-minute Office Hours session on the beach! Dang, that sun is powerful. Let's go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. This is a 360-degree video, so if you watch it on YouTube, you'll be able to pan the camera around and take a little virtual vacation with me.

How to Make Leading Wildcard Searches Fast

August 6, 2025

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:

[Video] Office Hours: Interview Horror Stories Edition

July 31, 2025

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.

[Video] Office Hours: Finally Back in the Home Office

July 10, 2025

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

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[Video] Office Hours in My London Hotel Room

June 25, 2025

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

Production DBA

Poll Results: How Often You’re Running Maintenance Tasks

June 24, 2025

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:

[Video] Office Hours on the Cruise Ship

June 19, 2025

I'm on a Med cruise, and I stopped the boat today in Corsica to make sure your questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento got the answers they deserve. I started by mentioning that I'm using a 360 degree camera, but the file size on that video was so huge that I couldn't upload it from the cruise ship, so you just get the 180 version.

[Video] Office Hours at the Barcelona Pavilion

June 12, 2025

I've always wanted to see the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe, and by happy coincidence, I ended up walking right past it while visiting Barcelona! It's one of the most important beginnings of modern architecture, and I loved it. I brought you along with me and talked through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

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[Video] Office Hours in the Detroit Airport

June 5, 2025

I'm in the Detroit airport today, en route home after a client gig. I've got some time to kill, so let's go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yd59N2bWzQ

[Video] Office Hours: Recovering from a Cold Edition

May 29, 2025

While recovering from a nasty cold, I took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et1mNyC1lIk

[Video] Office Hours at the Hoover Dam

May 15, 2025

Dam! I took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento without making any dam or beaver puns. Rather proud of myself for that one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUqIJtps8Y4

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Performance Tuning

SQL Server 2022 Finally Fixed a SQL Server 2008 Query Plan Bug!

April 29, 2025

For yeeeeeears, when I've explained execution plans, part of my explanation has included the instructions, "Read the plan from right to left, top to bottom, looking for the place where the estimates vs actuals are suddenly way off." Here's an example:

Things seem to be going okay on the query plan until you hit the key lookup, which brought back 13 rows of an estimated 19,452. That would appear to be a pretty doggone bad estimate.

[Video] Office Hours: Hello Kitty Porsche Edition

April 24, 2025

On a nice sunny Saturday, I took the 911 around the Las Vegas canyons, and stopped to answer your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja90e234rIo

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Performance Tuning

Your SQL Server Needs Spring Cleaning, Too.

April 16, 2025

First things first: pick up that filthy keyboard, take it over to the trash can, turn it upside down, and give it a good, vigorous shake.

Next, go to your biggest SQL Server and run: