KDA: Echoes of Deception - Case 1

Another KDA case: Digitown’s utility bills suddenly doubled for no good reason. With the election coming up, I got pulled in to figure out what went wrong. I’ve got...

KDA: Echoes of Deception - Onboarding

I’ll walk through the KDA UI and tackle the first challenge before diving into the real cases.
The UI layout
This is what your layout might look like:

LHS menu where you...

Kusto Detective Agency - Intro

While I mostly write about SQL Server, I have a soft spot for Kusto. In this series, I will explore solutions to fun challenges collectively known as the Kusto...

Deploy at Low Priority

Learn how to deploy schema changes in an always-online SQL Server environment without a maintenance window. This utility reduces blocking and improves deployment success.
The problem
I attempted to deploy a...

Why is fn_xe_file_target_read_file the worst SQL function?

I haven’t had a rant post in a while. There is a saying: “Anything before the word ‘but’ is ignored”. I love Extended Events, but …
reading the extended event...

Finding nested references

I originally planned this post just as an answer to DBA Stack Overflow question: How can I get the list of tables in all the stored procedure? After preparing...

Database CI/CD Basics (T-SQL Tuesday #177)

This month’s invitation is from Mala Mahadevan (b) asking us how we manage the database code. Since this is my passion project, I have a few basic tips to...

Service Broker Blocking

This post is dedicated to all 10 other DBAs that use Service Broker (you know who you are).
The main reason for this blog post is that I’ve got no...

My Toolbox - SSMS

No matter how hard Azure Data Studio (ADS) is pushed by Microsoft, most DBAs still use SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). In this blog post, I’ll go through my...

Async stats update causing blocking

I recently encountered an issue where an index rebuild set to wait_at_low_priority ended up blocking an asynchronous statistics update.
This interaction led to a large blocking chain where queries were...