SQLBlog.org

Stack Overflow had two outages involving the same identity column.

I talk about multiple ways NOLOCK can seduce you into basing update decisions on faulty data.

I demonstrate a procedure I wrote to script SQL Server Agent jobs idempotently, avoiding GOTO labels and schedule spaghetti.

I talk about archive tables in SQL Server and how to improve the process using table partitioning.

For T-SQL Tuesday #200, I offer up one thing that always raises my eyebrows during a code review: the RIGHT OUTER JOIN.

I recently solved a huge memory grant issue by rewriting a query.

The most recent failover of Stack Overflow - a busy, 8TB database - took 12 seconds.

In this series on common SQL Server problems, I provide some guidance around the error message "An invalid length was passed to the LEFT or SUBSTRING function..." errors.

I detail issues we experienced (and maybe should have expected) while upgrading to SQL Server 2025.

In this tip, I show a few pagination tricks to let users filter without killing performance.

In this tip, I talk about an approach to achieve constant (O(1)) performance on every page instead of just the early pages.

In this ongoing series on common problems in SQL Server, I explain many possible reasons for "Invalid Object Name" errors.

In the past, we've used xp_cmdshell and PowerShell to send Slack messages from the database.

SQL Server 2025 introduced a new way to hit APIs from the engine, but is it better than all the quirky ways we've done this in the past?

In my previous post, I showed how I collect index information across all replicas to get the whole picture.

In this post, I show how I make decisions about unused or redundant indexes with the whole picture: analyzing activity across primary and all secondary replicas.

I recently built a process to create a new filtered index on a schedule to support a UI that only cares about the last 30 days.

I dug a little into one of the new RegEx functions in SQL Server 2025: REGEXP_SPLIT_TO_TABLE.

In this follow-up, I show how we determine all possible point of time restores and identify which backup files to keep in order to meet our recovery objectives.

In this article, I detail some of the things we do to manage backups and retention policies for hundreds of production databases.

I put together a brief list of all the things that can cause "A network-related or instance-specific" error messages, and a few things that can't.

As the SQL Server 2025 public preview hit the streets, I had to test the new backup compression algorithn, ZSTD, on a decently-sized database.

Occasionally, it's fun to talk about our wish lists for SQL Server.

I recently had a great conversation with Louis Davidson as part of his "Coffee chat with..." series on Simple Talk.

I show an inline table-valued function to extract values from an integer encoded with days of the week.