[Video] Office Hours in North Bay, Ontario
I’m up in North Bay, Ontario, Canada for the 2026 Can-Am Curling Cup run by Aaron Bertrand – and my team actually won! Hanging out with Andy Mallon, Aaron Bertrand, Leanne Swart, Michael J Swart, and Ken Mallon before the tournament The winning team, w …
How to migrate from on-prem to the cloud: uncovering legacy system ‘skeletons’
In this article, Pat Wright explains how to identify hidden risks in legacy applications before moving to the cloud. It features practical advice and guidance to avoid migration failures and surprises. I have worked in very few companies that had appli …
Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for March 2026
For the last few years, I’ve slowed the First Responder Kit release down to once per quarter. It felt pretty feature-complete, and I didn’t want to make y’all upgrade any more than you have to. You’re busy, and I don’t want to take up your time unless …
How to determine the last value used by a sequence in SQL Server
I’ve been a fan of sequences ever since they were added in SQL Server 2012. Prior to that, developers had a choice of IDENTITY columns or a roll-your-own table mechanism. What are sequences in SQL Server? Sequences allow us to create a schema-bound obj …
Get Free AI Query Advice in PasteThePlan.
At PasteThePlan.com, you can paste execution plans into your browser, then send a link to someone else to get query advice. It’s useful for online forums, Stack Exchange, and the like. After you paste the plan, you’ve got a new AI Suggestions tab. It s …
The Curious Case of… no buffer pool memory and no OS memory available
Jonathan had a client issue recently where SQL Server’s buffer pool had been forced down to a ridiculously small size, only a few hundred MB, but the OS also showed basically no free memory. Page Life Expectancy was zero! What was going on? From invest …
Why the cloud is not a disaster recovery strategy for your critical databases
When AWS stumbled – twice – in October 2025, many teams discovered that “we are in the cloud” is not the same as “we have disaster recovery”. Applications went offline, customer-facing portals returned errors, and internal dashboards that teams rely on …
[Video] Office Hours, Standing in the Ocean Edition
My tripod is probably never gonna recover from the salt water, but the water was so nice that I couldn’t resist. This is a 360 video, so you can grab the screen and move it around to see Magens Bay in St Thomas, US Virgin Islands, as I go through your …
Using Claude Code with SQL Server and Azure SQL DB
Let’s start with a 7-minute demo video – I didn’t edit this down because I want you to be able to see what happens in real time. In this video, I point the desktop version of Claude Code at a Github issue for the First Responder Kit and tell it to do t …
How to use refresh tokens in ASP.NET Core – a complete guide
Today’s applications require robust security to ensure your application’s sensitive and confidential information is not compromised. This is exactly where access tokens and refresh tokens come in. Typically, these tokens are generated based on JWT open …
Row-Level Security Can Slow Down Queries. Index For It.
The official Azure SQL Dev’s Corner blog recently wrote about how to enable soft deletes in Azure SQL using row-level security, and it’s a nice, clean, short tutorial. I like posts like that because the feature is pretty cool and accomplishes a real bu …
Logical Reads Aren’t Repeatable on Columnstore Indexes. (sigh)
Sometimes I really hate my job. Forever now, FOREVER, it’s been a standard thing where I can say, “When you’re measuring storage performance during index and query tuning, you should always use logical reads, not physical reads, because logical reads a …
The SQL Server Transaction Log, Part 3: The Circular Nature of the Log
(This post first appeared on SQLperformance.com four years ago as part of a blog series, before that website was mothballed later in 2022 and the series was curtailed. Reposted here with permission, with a few tweaks.) In the second part of this series …
IDENTITY vs SEQUENCE in SQL Server – which should you use?
Auto-generated numeric keys are everywhere in relational databases. In SQL Server, two features dominate this space: IDENTITY columns SEQUENCE objects Both generate numbers. Both are fast. Both are widely used. Today, though, IDENTITY columns are by fa …
[Video] Office Hours: Back in the Bahamas Edition
Yes, I’m back on a cruise ship with another 360 degree video. Lest you think I’m being wildly irresponsible (or responsible perhaps?) with your consulting and training money, be aware that this particular cruise was free thanks to the fine folks in the …