How I Troubleshoot a Slow SQL Server Live

No two SQL Server environments are alike. A fix that resolves a performance issue in one environment may not work in another because every SQL Server instance has different...

T-SQL Tuesday #201 Invitation: Temp Tables, Friend or Foe?

My T-SQL Tuesday #201 invitation. Do temp tables help performance or hurt it? I argue moving data into a #temp table is usually the wrong reflex, and invite you...

Monday Monitor Tips: The MCP Server

I have been experimenting with MCP servers in a few ways, and pressing on our Redgate Monitor team to add one to their system. They did, started adding tools,...

Programmatic Tool Calling with the Claude SDK

Programmatic Tool Calling with the Claude SDK

Every morning somebody on the team runs the same check. Thirty tables in the staging schema, and the only thing anyone wants to...

A New Word: Mauerbauertraurigkeit

mauerbauertraurigkeit – n. inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends whose company you generally enjoy, like a poker player who keeps folding a promising hand in order...

Methodology for dealing with bad data in production

Pinal Dave wrote up his methodology for what to do when you discover bad data in production. If you’ve never been in this situation, having a plan beforehand is...

How to Provision an Azure SQL Database

Aside from spinning up a SQL Server instance container, the free Azure SQL Database is another great tool for learning SQL. You can even use it for low-traffic or...

Claude finds two cryptographic weaknesses (but the sky isn’t falling)

If you haven't seen the announcement, Anthropic was able to utilize Claude (Mythos Preview) to find cryptographic weaknesses in two algorithms. However, this doesn't impact anything anyone has in...

Generate Embeddings in SQL with Aurora and Bedrock

Most embedding pipelines on AWS have the same shape: a job reads rows out of the database, calls Amazon Bedrock, and writes the vectors back. That is a second...

Resolving SQL Server Transaction Log Issues Efficiently

Transaction log issues are one of the quietest ways a healthy database turns into an incident. A log file fills up, backups fall behind, and by the time anyone...