Why Your Index Isn't Being Used? - Reading Execution Plans to Find the Real Culprit
Built the index, but SQL Server still scans the whole table? Learn how to read execution plans and find exactly why your index is being ignored.
Improve Query Performance in the Fabric Warehouse with Clustering
Learn how to improve performance issues in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse and leverage cloud-based data analytics effectively.
We Are Eating Our Own Seed Corn
Last week I stood in front of a classroom at Washington State University and looked out at a room full of students who had done everything right. They had studied hard, were earning their degrees, built their portfolios, and showed up with genuine enthusiasm for careers in technology. They wanted to know what the industry […]
Designing SQL Server ETL Pipelines That Don't Break at Scale
A few lessons learned in building ETL pipelines and tricks to ensure you can easily maintain these over time.
Why I Don’t Like Shared Development Databases
Today, Kendra explains why she doesn't like shared development databases.
When, and when not, to use LLMs in your data pipeline
LLMs should be used in data pipelines for unstructured text, semantic search, and natural language queries – but avoided for deterministic, high-volume, or regulated tasks. Drawing on my real-world experience building large-scale ML systems, in this guide I’ll explain exactly where LLMs belong in your data pipeline and, just as importantly, where they don’t.
Restoring Azure Key Vault Keys and Validating SQL Server TDE Recovery: Level 7 of the Stairway to TDE
Learn about restoring your keys from an Azure Key Vault in the event of a DR situation.
Writing Before Reading
We often learn to write code before we really learn to read it, which seems like a problem to Steve.
There Are Days When I Feel Like Giving Up on the Plan Cache and Query Store.
In theory, SQL Server performance monitoring is pretty simple: 1. Review the server’s top wait types, 2. Find the queries causing those wait types, 3. Fix those queries, or improve the way the server reacts to them (indexes, settings, etc.). But in practice, step 2 is awful because:
Other IDEs
This editorial was originally published on Jun 17, 2020. It is being republished as Steve is out of town. Let us know if you've changed your SQL IDEs since then. Most of us use SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) to manage our SQL Server instances or to write database code. However, Microsoft does give us […]
Blogs
Keeping Redshift System Table History Past 7 Days with S3 Tables
Redshift keeps its SYS_* monitoring views for seven days in cluster, which is fine...
Updating the Data API Builder
By Steve Jones
I was updating my session for the Data API Builder (DAB) recently, mostly to...
T-SQL Tuesday #202 Invitation: That One SQL Server Outage You’ll Never Forget
I am excited to host T-SQL Tuesday for the first time. I want to...
Forums
Practical Ways to Approach SQL Server Problems and Case Studies
Working with SQL Server can involve more than just writing queries. Understanding database design,...
Measuring Productivity
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Measuring Productivity
Importing Excel files into SQL Server using DuckDB and Python
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Importing Excel files into SQL...
Question of the Day
Tracking All the Queries
I have 3 instances of a brand new long running query that are executing on a SQL Server 2025 instance. Query store is enabled. One of the queries is killed by the administrator, one is cancelled by the user. The other runs to completion. How many rows are in Query Store for this query?
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