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In Praise of Simplicity or The Power of Plain Language in a Buzzword World

There’s a moment I experience all too often in tech meetings, presentations, or vendor demos where someone starts talking, and instead of clarity, I get hit with a tidal wave of jargon: “synergizing AI-driven orchestration pipelines for real-time actionable insights using cloud-native microservices and agentic AI to serve as a digital twin.” And somewhere in […]

PostgreSQL Aggregate Functions

Overview In this article we will go through the various in built aggregate functions available in PostgreSQL. Aggregate functions perform a calculation on a set of rows and return a single value. COUNT Function The COUNT function is a simple and very useful function in counting the number of records, which are expected to be […]

The Mindset of a Database Administrator: A Love Letter to Risk Aversion

Sometimes, while working on something as foundational as SQL Server Central, (which is a temporary responsibility for Grant, John and I while Steve is on sabbatical) I catch myself falling into an old, familiar loop double-checking my choices, second-guessing even the most minor decisions, as is the norm for anyone who’s a database administrator (or […]

Unmasking CXPACKET and CXCONSUMER in SQL Server: What Your Execution Plan Isn’t Telling You

This article dives deep into cxpacket and cxconsumer in sql server, explaining how to simulate each, when they appear, and why they matter. Using live execution plans, wait monitoring, and worker thread diagnostics, we uncover how uneven parallelism triggers thread sync waits—and how SQL Server sometimes hides real issues behind innocent-looking CXCONSUMER waits. Includes step-by-step queries, tuning tips, and a real-world scenario where repartition streams quietly ruined performance.

State Transition Constraints

About two decades ago, I introduced the concept of transition constraints to show Data Validation in a database is a lot more complex than seeing if a string parameter really is an integer. In October of 2008, I did an article called Constraint Yourself! on how to use DDL constraints to assure data integrity. One of the topics in that piece was a look at state transition constraints via an auxiliary table.

The Long Weekend

In the US, this is the Independence Day weekend. I had a few spare vacation days, so I tacked one on, making this a four day weekend. My plans are simple. Prep for my family coming over on the 5th for a celebration of the 4th (Ha!). Work on my query tuning book (gotta make […]

Own Your Mistakes

Hello, Grant again as Steve is on sabbatical. My evenings and weekends are currently being used to update my SQL Server query performance book for 2025. I really enjoy it because writing the book forces me to structure my learning on SQL Server 2025, not just hit it in some slipshod manner. Plus, I've got […]

Filling Big Shoes

Hey all! It's me, Grant. For those who don't me, Grant Fritchey. I work with Steve Jones, the person normally talking to you here. Yes, Redgate actually employs me, and continues to. I don't know why either. Anyway, Steve is off for a few weeks on his sabbatical. More power to him and I hope […]

The Hidden Cost of MAXDOP: CPU Spikes, Query Slowdowns, and What We Learned

Misusing MAXDOP can silently kill performance across your SQL Server. In this deep dive, we uncover how one bad query caused CPU meltdown, run real-world tests, and show how tuning—not parallelism—often holds the true fix.