I started out working with Microsoft Access and SQL Server back in 2000 as the only employee doing IT full-time, and worked most of my career where “big fish in a little pond” was an overstatement. Learning is scarce when you do everything and don’t work with anyone who knows more than you. In 2010 I was plunged into the Ocean and grabbed onto anything I could find to stay afloat. I wasn’t going to simply run scripts I didn’t understand, so I learned the DMVs and system tables in the scripts I found and rewrote them all. Now, I know enough where I can start giving back to a community that saved me from drowning.

Blog Post

TempDB memory leak?

I found a bug where I’m seeing TempDB use more memory than it should on multiple versions of SQL Server, especially on servers set up with common best practices. There’s a...

2016-01-05

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Blog Post

Advent of Code

If you want your skills to be sharp, you practice.  If you want to get yourself to actually do practice,...

2016-01-04 (first published: )

1,540 reads

Blog Post

Indexing Strategy

What do I care about when I’m playing with indexes? That’s easy. I want as few indexes as possible efficiently referenced...

2015-12-28 (first published: )

3,524 reads

Blogs

Time to Revive our YouTube Channel

By

It’s been forgotten about and neglected for few years but I’ve decided to dust...

Microsoft MVP 2025: Continuing the Data Platform Journey

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I am honored to announce that I have been renewed as a Microsoft MVP...

What is KTLO? Keep The Lights On vs Project Work in Agile

By

🔍 Demystifying KTLO: A Deep Dive into Keep The Lights On Work in IT...

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Forums

How a Legacy Logic Choked SQL Server in a 30-Year-Old Factory

By Chandan Shukla

Comments posted to this topic are about the item How a Legacy Logic Choked...

Navigating Multi Platform Realities in My Database Life

By dbakevlar

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Navigating Multi Platform Realities in...

Import/Export SSMS Settings issue

By Brandie Tarvin

I have tried a number of times to export and then import my SSMS...

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Question of the Day

Query Plan Regressions --

For the Question of the day, I am going to go deep, but try to be more clear, as I feel like I didn't give enough info last time, leading folks to guess the wrong answer... :) For today's question:  You’re troubleshooting a performance issue on a critical stored procedure. You notice that a previously efficient query now performs a full table scan instead of an index seek. Upon investigating, you find that an NVARCHAR parameter is being compared to a VARCHAR column in the WHERE clause. What is the most likely cause of the query plan regression?

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