Words: 375Time to read: ~2 minutes Hey! … Now that I have your attention, can you see what’s wrong with this query? Prep Like every food recipe out there, I’m going to make you sit thro…

A few years ago I took a new job at Microsoft, working as a Senior Content Developer, and as of this writing I own all the SQL Server content in Microsoft Docs. Not bad. After the release of ChatGPT…

Years ago, when troubleshooting performance, I stumbled across this Microsoft documentation on parallel query processing that says: Certain types of statements cannot be processed in parallel unless…

A CHECK constraint accepts a row when its predicate is UNKNOWN, so CHECK (quantity >= 0) still allows NULL. How to close the gap.

Welcome back to the plansplaining series. Probably the one with the longest, and least clickbaity title. The idea of plansplaining is to take a single execution plan and then fully dissect it, until e...

Alt: Louise Belcher's Fiery Evil Laugh

T-SQL Tuesday #202, in which Andy talks about his largest-ever system outage and how everything was recovered.

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday invitation comes from Marlon Ribunal, and it's titled "That One SQL Server Outage You’ll Never Forget".

Welcome to PSConfEU MiniCon 2026's Call for Speakers!PSConfEU MiniCon is a free online event that brings together members of the PowerShell community ...

Nine community takes on temp tables in tempdb, summarized: plan boundaries, statistics, scope, and when to reach for one.

Put common PowerShell advice to the test with Matthew Dowst as we benchmark myths, edge cases, and best practices.

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

For August’s T-SQL Tuesday ask, Jeff has thrown temp tables to the wolves. Does the community like or loathe their usage? I’ll predict a few ‘it depends’ resp…

It's another T-SQL Tuesday! Thanks to Jeff Taylor for hosting this month. You can find his full invitation here. Jeff wants to know where we stand: Are temp tables our "friend" or our "foe", even while we acknowledge that the likely answer is "it depends". My stance is that temp tables are a useful tool when properly used, but they're very easy to misuse to the point of creating problems.

Words: 1100Time to read: ~ 6 minutes Nothing Welcome to T-SQL Tuesday, the monthly blog party started by Adam Machanic and maintained by Steve Jones. Each month, a different host chooses a topic fo…

Alt: A dishevelled Fry from Futurama, wearing a suit, pouring coffee into a cup and jittery with presumably previous cups of coffee...

Alt: Tired Golden Retriever Dog Looks Down and sighs

Have you ever wanted to run a query against all of the Azure SQL Databases on an instance? This is the post for you, of course, using dbatools!

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 (or the code hasn't been changed in decades), then you're gonna be in for a rocky road.

A PowerShell dependency handler. Declare your dependencies in a .psd1 file and let Invoke-PSDepend resolve, install, import, and test them.

This site has different types of readers. Those that come here to quickly look up something, using it as the reference this is. And those that read everything, or at least the pages they consider inte...

Alt: Willem Dafoe's Gravewalker Nuncamorto Laugh

I am furious right now. Vimeo has made a mistake, and as a result, the SQLServerFast Execution Plan Video Training is currently not available for viewing. Vimeo’s announcement Four days ago, I got a n...