Monitoring and alerting can be overwhelming tasks, especially for those new to the world of managing production data. One common challenge for any data professional is the identification and management of queries that run for longer than they should.
2026-03-09
In my previous tip, Pagination Performance in SQL Server, I showed how to make SQL pagination more predictable – turning O(n) into O(1). I materialized and cached row numbers to page through instead of calculating them on every request. It wasn’t the whole story, though; real pagination queries rarely get to sort without filtering. Users always want more control, and filtering can threaten that predictability.
2026-02-06
2026-01-30
414 reads
Sometimes we cannot improve query performance because we don’t have control over the code. Consider a query that is generated by Entity Framework (EF) from the application and you do not have access to the source code. The main question is how you can improve SQL Server query optimization for a poorly performing query?
2026-01-05
First off, I understand if you read the headline and you have a knee-jerk reaction. I totally understand that there are a lot of people out there who hate AI, and believe me, I hate most uses of it. Lots of its advice can be misleading at best, and absolute garbage at worst.
2025-12-22
Batched deletions are a common strategy in SQL Server to manage large datasets without overloading the system, but poorly tuned deletes can cause blocking, long-running transactions, and heavy log usage. Learn how to monitor and optimize these processes for smooth, efficient database performance.
2025-12-12
Learn about filtered indexes in SQL Server, how they work, and how they can help improve performance.
2025-11-24
4,100 reads
Learn how indexes can help you with more than just querying data.
2025-10-22
17,252 reads
2025-10-15
1,675 reads
SQL Server 2025 introduces a new sys.dm_os_memory_health_history view to make it easier for meatbags like you and robots like Copilot to know if the SQL Server has been under memory pressure recently.
2025-10-06
By Steve Jones
AI is everywhere. It’s in the news, it’s being added to every product, management...
By Vinay Thakur
RAG — Retrieval Augmented Generation. we have covered so far — embeddings, vectors, vector...
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 6 we learned Embeddings, Semantic Search and Checks, on Day 7...
I've written some documentation on using different Markdown types of files on GitHub. It's...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Not Just an Upgrade
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Restoring On Top I
I am doing development work on a database and want to keep a backup so I can reset my database. I make some changes and want to restore over top of my changes. When I run this code, what happens?
USE Master BACKUP DATABASE DNRTest TO DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' GO USE DNRTest GO CREATE TABLE MyTest(myid INT) GO USE master RESTORE DATABASE DNRTest FROM DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' WITH REPLACESee possible answers