The Scary DBA

Blog Post

Two Clustered Indexes?

Everyone knows that you only get a single clustered index, right? Wouldn’t it be great though if you could have two clustered indexes? Well, you can. Sort of. Let’s...

2022-01-31 (first published: )

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Blog Post

Why Is “WHERE 1=0” Slow?

I saw a question the other day, questioning why they’re creation of temporary tables was so slow. What they were doing was (a much more complicated version of) this:...

2022-01-24 (first published: )

914 reads

Blog Post

Identifying Recompile Causes

Strictly speaking, a recompile isn’t really a performance tuning problem. In fact, a lot of time, recompiles are desired because they reflect changes in statistics which are likely to...

2022-01-12 (first published: )

290 reads

Blog Post

Login Timeouts

I was recently approached at work about a company that was seeing tons of timeouts in SQL Server. I was asked how to troubleshoot this. There are lots of...

2021-10-06 (first published: )

587 reads

Blog Post

Login Timeouts

I was recently approached at work about a company that was seeing tons of timeouts in SQL Server. I was asked how to troubleshoot this. There are lots of...

2021-09-27

9 reads

Blog Post

Containers: A Short Rant

I find myself doing more and more work with containers. Yet, I also find that a lot of people seem to be resistant to the concept. I’m always surprised...

2021-09-29 (first published: )

489 reads

Blogs

How to Clear the SSMS Cache (SSMS 21 and Later)

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How to Clear the SSMS Cache (SSMS 21 and Later) Updated...

The flight recorder: Replaying what an AI agent did on my SQL Server

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“What exactly did it do on my server?” is the first question a DBA...

Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference — Barcelona 2026

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Microsoft shared a broad set of Fabric, Power BI, and SQL updates at FabCon...

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Forums

Let's Talk Certifications

By Grant Fritchey

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Let's Talk Certifications

The Hidden Security Risks of Role Combination in SSAS Tabular

By Pablo Echeverria

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Hidden Security Risks of...

The Empty Aggregate

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Empty Aggregate

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Question of the Day

The Empty Aggregate

I have this table in a SQL Server 2025 database: 

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CustomerOrder]
(
[OrderID] [int] NULL,
[CustomerID] [int] NULL,
[total] [money] NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]
GO
What is returned from this code? (answers are for the sum and then the count) 
SELECT SUM(total) AS sum,
       COUNT(total) AS count
FROM dbo.CustomerOrder;

See possible answers