Writing, reviewing, debugging, and maintaining T-SQL and database code.
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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…
I open it up and the first thing I see is a comment with a changelog showing a long list of dates and author initials.
Oh I know, you think documentation is a good thing, but:
Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 22.7 added the ability to format your T-SQL queries by right-clicking and clicking Format SQL, or by hitting control-K, control-Q on your keyboard:
You're probably not going to like the default formatting out of the box because you're the kind of person who has strong, passionate feelings and likes to argue about them on the Internet. Good news! The configurations are really flexible. Go into Tools, Options, SQL Formatter:
On a 12-hour layover in Keflavik, I pulled over my Suzuki Jimny (love these little things, and we can't buy them in the US) in some of the freshest real estate in the world and took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. This is a 360-degree video, so you can move the camera angle around with your mouse.
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:
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
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
Ever just need a quick visualization of some numbers to get a rough idea of the trend, like this:
Option 1: ask Copilot to write the query for you.
Copilot in SSMS has two parts. Usually people focus on the pop-out Copilot chat window, and that's useful for sure, but honestly I think you're going to get way more mileage out of the code completions feature, right away, because it blends in with your existing workflows. Let's say that I'm working with the Stack…
I'm up in North Bay, Ontario, Canada for the 2026 Can-Am Curling Cup run by Aaron Bertrand - and my team actually won!
Let's bask in the warmth (cough) of our glory as we go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
Want to ask your own questions or pick the ones I discuss? Head over to https://pollgab.com/room/brento to get involved. In the meantime, let's hang out in the backyard, where Beni makes a special guest appearance.
https://youtu.be/aMMBj4owm3A
I know a lot of y'all lag behind on upgrading SSMS, but v22.3 just introduced something that you need to be aware of. It's going to impact any of your users who DO upgrade their SSMS, or who use Github Copilot. There's something that you can do in order to improve Copilot's code quality and make it match your preferred coding standards.
When I travel, I try to take y'all with me to really pretty or at least interesting locations. On my Tokyo visit last year, I did Office Hours in Akihabara, the electronics & anime shopping hub. Even though I'm not into anime at all and I don't collect that kind of gear, I wanted to see it because it's famous among geeks.
This seems like the appropriate first BrentOzar.com blog post in the year 2026, eh?
In the PollGab question queue for Office Hours, MyRobotOverlordAsks asked a question that merited a full blog post answer:
Say you've got a table with an identity column, something that's supposed to start at 1 and go up to a bajillion:
[crayon-6a6eb8038d350760124522/]
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
It's the perfect time of year in Las Vegas when we can chill outside by the fire, enjoy a glass of wine, and go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esMYx_mbfqo
In last week's Query Exercise, I challenged you to play some code golf to generate big spills with tiny T-SQL.
Today, I'm going to walk you through my thought process - the initial attempts I tried and failed with, and the discoveries I made along the way, because I think it makes for fun storytelling.
When I was testing SQL Server 2025's new ability to limit TempDB usage with Resource Governor, I wrote a few fun diabolical demos. One of them was to generate giant spills to TempDB, quickly.
When you're looking at an actual (not estimated) query plan, and you see a yellow exclamation point on a sort operator, that means:
I love SQL Server, and I'm excited for the release of 2025. I think the query processing keeps getting better, which means your apps are gonna go faster, with less code changes. The AI stuff is a little fluffy, and I don't think time will be kind to it, but I totally understand why Microsoft…
