Articles

SQLServerCentral Article

Unmasking CXPACKET and CXCONSUMER in SQL Server: What Your Execution Plan Isn’t Telling You

This article dives deep into cxpacket and cxconsumer in sql server, explaining how to simulate each, when they appear, and why they matter. Using live execution plans, wait monitoring, and worker thread diagnostics, we uncover how uneven parallelism triggers thread sync waits—and how SQL Server sometimes hides real issues behind innocent-looking CXCONSUMER waits. Includes step-by-step queries, tuning tips, and a real-world scenario where repartition streams quietly ruined performance.

(5)

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2025-07-07

4,431 reads

External Article

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 Yourself! on how to use DDL constraints to assure data integrity. One of the topics in that piece was a look at state transition constraints via an auxiliary table.

2025-07-07

SQLServerCentral Article

Parameterize Connections in Microsoft Fabric Data Factory using Variable Libraries

Building pipelines in Microsoft Fabric can be complicated, and it's easy to write code that is hard to maintain. Using parameters in your connections helps to build pipelines that are easily configured.

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2025-07-04 (first published: )

6,744 reads

External Article

Data Encoding Schemes

Your choice of how you encode data can be significant. With computers and databases, you have a wide range of options. As a programmer, you will likely be called upon at some time in your career to design and coding scheme for particular application. It would really help if you at least avoided designing a bad one.

2025-06-30

Blogs

Microsoft MVP 2026: Ten Years on the Data Platform

By

I’m honored to announce that I’ve been renewed as a Microsoft MVP for the...

Building AgentDBA’s Slack Escalation

By

Until now, a CRITICAL finding did the right internal routing, but the last mile...

Changing the Owner Removes Permissions: #SQLNewBlogger

By

This is actually inspired by an article SQL Server Central, which taught me something...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Developer edition cannot connect from other computers

By sqlfriend

I installed a new SQL server 2025 Enterprise developer edition for our development environment....

How Clustering can be Used as a Preprocessing Technique for Classification in Azure Machine Learning

By Dinesh Asanka

Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Clustering can be Used...

Moving the Error Log

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Moving the Error Log

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

Moving the Error Log

How can I change the location in which the SQL Server error log is written in SQL Server 2025?

See possible answers