A New Word: the Kinder Surprise

the kinder surprise – . the point in your early adolescence when you realize that your parents are muddling through their lives the same as you; that many respectable...

Crash-Consistent Snapshot Cloning - Hyper-V Edition

If you’ve been following my T-SQL Snapshot Backup series, most of what I’ve covered requires SQL Server to participate in the snapshot: the write IO freeze, the metadata backup,...

Get a Range of Sequence Values: #SQLNewBlogger

I discovered a procedure recently that I wasn’t aware of: sp_sequence_get_range. This post looks at how the proc works. Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves...

Overcoming Imposter Syndrome: A Plan

My most recent bout with imposter syndrome was with ISACA’s Digital Trust Ecosystem Framework (DTEF) foundation exam. I’m blogging about it because I know a lot of people struggle...

PlanTrace Now Supports PostgreSQL

PlanTrace Now Supports PostgreSQL

The same plan analysis you know from Redshift, now for PostgreSQL — including EXPLAIN ANALYZE, buffer stats, and JSON format.

When...

Using T-SQL Snapshot Backup - Hyper-V Edition

If you’ve been following my T-SQL Snapshot Backup series, you’ve seen this technique work on bare-metal and standard VM deployments where database files live on volumes directly presented to...

Free Webinar about Columnstore Indexes

I’m doing a small series on indexing basics for SQL Server, and on May 14th I’ll be presenting the third part which is about columnstore indexes. You can watch...

Future IT Roles – Agentic Architect and AI Boom!!

These days everything is changing to AI World, IT roles are getting changed and it is going towards AI ways, everyone in IT should be aware of AI –...

PlanTrace: Stop Reading Redshift EXPLAIN Plans. Start Seeing Them

PlanTrace: Stop Reading Redshift EXPLAIN Plans. Start Seeing Them

Introducing PlanTrace — a free, browser-based tool that turns raw execution plans into interactive graphs and actionable tuning insights.

plantrace.studyyourdata.com

PlanTrace...

VPN + SQL Server Connections: Why Long-Working Setups Suddenly Fail with Msg 10054 and “Connection Broken”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been contacted by multiple customers experiencing the same frustrating issue. Applications and SSMS sessions that had been rock-solid for years suddenly started throwing...