When I was perusing my LinkedIn feed the other day, I came across this thread about using SELECT *. In one of the replies, Aaron Cutshall noted that: “Another real performance killer is SELECT DISTINCT especially when combined with UNION. I have a whole list of commonly used hidden performance killers!”
2025-07-04
SQL Server 2025 improved PSPO to handle multiple predicates that might have parameter sensitivity, and that’s great! I love it when Microsoft ships a v1 feature, and then gradually iterates over to make it better. Adaptive Memory Grants were a similar investment that got improved over time, and today they’re fantastic.
2025-07-02
Learn how to get started running R scripts in R/Studio for data analysis.
2025-06-30
2,207 reads
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
In this next part of the series on Managed Instance, we see how to discover a bit about the internals of how the instance is being run. Learn how to kill and respawn a Managed Instance.
2025-06-27
1,164 reads
SQL Server has several functions to assist with meta data about the server, databases, indexes, and more. In this tip, we will look at how to get index information for indexes in a database using the INDEXPROPERTY function.
2025-06-27
Starting in SQL Server 2025, a new edition is available for installation: SQL Server Developer Standard Edition. This article dives into this edition, the problems it solves, and why it is a great addition for development teams that use SQL Server!
2025-06-25
Misusing MAXDOP can silently kill performance across your SQL Server. In this deep dive, we uncover how one bad query caused CPU meltdown, run real-world tests, and show how tuning—not parallelism—often holds the true fix.
2025-06-23
5,001 reads
There are multiple reasons for no full backup: corrupted backups, taking too much time to restore, etc. In this post, I want to show an alternative for these cases, an ace up one’s sleeve, that you can use to recover data.
2025-06-23
Learn about a few different options for migrating from Microsoft SQL Server to PostgreSQL.
2025-06-20
2,356 reads
By Steve Jones
I got a notification from a question I’d posted at SQL Server Central: Getting...
By SQLPals
SQL Server sa Account Security: Rename, Disable & Best Practices In...
By Brian Kelley
Artificial Intelligence and quantum computing are two areas of emerging technology that receive most...
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I add this parameter to SQL Server 2025 in the Configuration Manager:
-mDynamicsWhat does this do? See possible answers