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
T-SQL Tuesday #203: Risk and Reward
By Steve Jones
This is timely, as I’m currently on a boat in the Adriatic taking a...
dataMinds Connect 2026 – Slides & Scripts
You can find the slides and SQL scripts for my session “Spice up your...
How to Clear the SSMS Cache (SSMS 21 and Later)
By SQLPals
How to Clear the SSMS Cache (SSMS 21 and Later) Updated...
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Question of the Day
Using CHOOSE()
We have this code that sets some status values and then queries them using the CHOOSE() function in SQL Server 2025.
CREATE TABLE Status
(
StatusID INT,
StatusDescription VARCHAR(20)
);
GO
INSERT dbo.Status
(
StatusID,
StatusDescription
)
VALUES
(0, 'Uncategorized'),
(1, 'Active'),
(2, 'Inactive'),
(3, 'Temp');
GO
SELECT CHOOSE(StatusID, 'Unknown', 'Active', 'Inactive', 'Temporary')
FROM Status;
When the SELECT runs, what is returned? See possible answers