[Video] Office Hours Aboard the Groove Cruise
On the world’s largest floating electronic dance music festival, I took your top-voted database questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 01:54 Frost: What is your opinion on Group Managed Service Accounts? 04: …
Who’s Hiring Database People? February 2026 Edition
Is your company hiring for a database position as of February 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: Your comment must include the job ti …
I’m Coming to #SQLBits! Here are My Sessions.
The annual SQLBits conference is April 22-25, and they just announced the session and speaker lineup. This year’s theme is Cartoon – something I love deeply to begin with – and I decided to lean into that theme, big time. Here are my sessions: Training …
[Video] Home Office Hours, Under Construction Edition
While in the midst of moving my home office into a new room in the house, I stopped to take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. About 18.5 minutes into the recording, my camera overheated because I hadn’t set up the fan on it …
Automatic Stats Updates Don’t Always Invalidate Cached Plans
Normally, when SQL Server updates statistics on an object, it invalidates the cached plans that rely on that statistic as well. That’s why you’ll see recompiles happen after stats updates: SQL Server knows the stats have changed, so it’s a good time to …
Securing Your Databases in 2026: Best Practices for the Evolving Threat Landscape
In 2026, your approach to both applications and databases must be focused on practical and technical real-world operations and use cases rather than just hype. If not, you’re heading for trouble as threat actors are becoming more sophisticated and the …
Maybe You Shouldn’t Even Be Using Clustering or AGs.
Sandra Delany (LinkedIn) wrote a well-thought-out blog post called, “Should a SQL Server DBA Know Windows Clustering?” She’s got about 20 years of DBA experience, and she works for Straight Path (a firm I respect) as a consultant. You can probably gues …
SQL Server 2025 CU1 is Off to a Rough Start
SQL Server 2025 Cumulative Update 1 came out last week, and I was kinda confused by the release notes. They described a couple dozen fixed issues, and the list seemed really short for a CU1. However, the more I dug into it, the weirder things got. For …
Thoughts on PASS’s Bankruptcy, Redgate’s Acquisition, and Private Equity
A private equity (PE) company recently acquired the majority of Redgate Software, the current owners of the PASS Data Community Summit and SQLServerCentral. Everybody in tech has private equity stories, some good, some terribad. Private equity hands mo …
SQL ConstantCare® Population Report: Winter 2026
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. In short, people are replacing SQL Server 2016 and 2017 with 2022! SQL Server 2025: 0% (but it’s 10 s …
Announcing the 2026 Data Professional Salary Survey Results, And They’re Great!
The results are in! You can download the raw data in Excel for all 10 years and do some slicing and dicing to find out whether you’re underpaid, overpaid, or what it looks like for folks who are out there looking for work. This year, I added a couple o …
Common SQL Server Problems: Invalid Length
This is another part in my series designed to offer guidance around common issues in SQL Server. Today, let’s talk about the all-too-common error: invalid length. What Is the Invalid Length Error in SQL Server? Msg 537, Level 16, State 3 Invalid length …
SQLBits Session Voting is Open Now! Wanna See My Sessions at Bits?
I’d love to come over and speak at SQLBits this April, but for that to happen, the organizers need to hear from you that you’d come see my sessions. If you’re going to Bits, you’ll need a login, and then you can vote on these sessions – but only if you …
Vibe Optimizing Power BI
Derrière ce titre accrocheur, cet article rapide explore comment optimiser Power BI à la fois en termes de performance et d’expérience utilisateur, tout en présentant un nouvel outil puissant issu de la Microsoft Fabric Toolbox : DAX Performance Tuner …
Exploiting SQL Server Date Correlation Optimization: How Tampered Backups Enable Cross‑Database Data Leaks
This article is a follow-up to SQL Server DBaaS Vulnerability: Decrypting System Code & Exfiltrating User Data, in which we saw some vulnerabilities that affected pretty much all DBaaS offerings available in the cloud. Now, we’ll look at another vu …