Mastering Class Updates on Resource_Semaphore, The Ascending Key Problem, and The Cloud
I’ve posted a couple of updated videos to my Mastering courses. In Mastering Server Tuning, I updated and expanded the RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE module to cover more details about query workspace grants, plus cover SQL Server 2022’s updates to Adaptive Memory …
[Video] Office Hours in My London Hotel Room
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 i …
Poll Results: How Often You’re Running Maintenance Tasks
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: You’re typically taking full backups daily or weekly. I’m actually surpr …
State Transition Constraints
About two decades ago, I introduced the concept of transition constraints to show Data Validation in a database is a lot more complex than seeing if a string parameter really is an integer. In October of 2008, I did an article called Constraint Yoursel …
The Hidden Cost of MAXDOP: CPU Spikes, Query Slowdowns, and What We Learned
Introduction In our TB-scale production system, a few queries had MAXDOP 4 hardcoded into them. The goal was to improve reporting performance. Instead, CPU usage spiked and the entire server slowed down—even simple queries were affected. This article e …
Oracle ASM: Monitoring and Managing (Part 2)
In the first part of this series, we explored the fundamentals of Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM)—a powerful volume manager and file system integrated with Oracle Database. ASM simplifies storage by abstracting physical disks into disk groups …
SQL Server Reporting Services is Dead. Is SSIS Next?
It’s official: SQL Server 2022 was the last release for SSRS. At SQLBits this week, Microsoft announced that SQL Server 2025 won’t include SSRS. Instead, all SQL Server 2025 customers will get free licensing for the on-premises Power BI Report Server ( …
How to Choose the Right Tool for MS SQL to PostgreSQL Migration
This whitepaper serves as an in-depth guide for database administrators (DBAs), software engineers, data architects, and even semi-technical managers who are planning or evaluating a migration from Microsoft SQL Server (MS SQL) to PostgreSQL. The migra …
Replacing a Column in a Large Active SQL Server Table
In a previous post I showed how to use a batching strategy to remove large amounts of data from a table while it is being used. Today I will apply the same technique to another common problem- changing the datatype of a column. A common use of this is …
[Video] Office Hours on the Cruise Ship
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 …
Getting started with Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server
Along with its many other cloud services, Microsoft now offers Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server, a database-as-a-service platform based on the PostgreSQL open-source database system. DBAs, developers, analysts, and other users who are fami …
[Poll] How Often Do You Run Maintenance Tasks?
How often do you run backups, corruption checking, index maintenance, and statistics updates? Click here to take the anonymous poll. After you fill it out, you’ll be able to see the average responses from other folks. I’ll circle back next week and sha …
Inside the Walls of Azure SQL MI
Welcome to the prologue article for a three-part series where I try to infiltrate the OS layer of Azure SQL Managed Instance and uncover a few surprises Microsoft didn’t expect me to find. Before we dive into the rabbit holes, let’s zoom out. In the cl …
Free Webcast Next Thursday: Tuning Indexes to Avoid Blocking
Indexing can make or break your SQL Server performance. You need just the right balance: enough indexes to speed up your queries, but not so many that they drag down your inserts, updates, and deletes. Join me as I introduce the “5 & 5 indexing gui …
DevOps vs. SRE: Bridging the Gap, Not Building Walls (Part 1)
Understanding the Divide — DevOps vs. SRE Explained The conversation around DevOps versus Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is becoming increasingly common in modern software and platform engineering teams. These two frameworks aim to optimize how we …