Monitoring TempDB Contention using Extended Events and SQL Monitor
Sometimes, a database will slow down exponentially when it is working hard, with many concurrent users. Well, to be more accurate, all the databases on the instance will slow down.
Research Paper Week: Plan Stitch: Harnessing the Best of Many Plans
In his latest blog posts Brent shares his favourite research papers, explaining why he found them interesting and why you might too. STarting off with the Microsoft Research paper Plan Stitch: Harnessing the Best of Many Plans by Bailu Ding, Sudipto Das, Wentao Wu, Surajit Chaudhuri, and Vivek Narasayya (2018)
The State of DevOps Report for 2019
It seems like just a few weeks ago that I went over the 2018 results with Gene Kim. That was an exciting few weeks for me, running over the report in prep and then having the opportunity to host a webinar with Gene Kim. Exciting times, but it's been almost a year and the 2019 […]
Goodbye to the Microsoft Professional Program
Kathi Kellenberger addresses the retirement of the Microsoft Professional Program in the latest SImple Talk Editorial. Stop by and let her know your thoughts.
Neglecting to Use, or Misusing, the RETURN Keyword (BP016)
Phil Factor demonstrates the correct use of the RETURN keyword in stored procedures or batches, to pass back a non-zero RETURN code to the calling process, informing it of the error. He also explains some of its misuses.
How to Stop a SSIS Package Execution from Code
In this tip we look at a way to stop the execution of a SSIS data flow task that is running by executing an outside process to stop the data flow immediately.
Self-service and Delegation with SQL Clone 4 Teams
SQL Clone 4 introduces a new access control feature called Teams, allowing granular control over the SQL Server instances, images and clones to which each group of users has access. Here James Murtagh explains how Teams makes it easier to manage the safe distribution of database copies throughout the organization, to the various teams that need them for development, testing, training or analysis.
Business Pressures
The business pressures can often change how we work, or even how we build our software. A few notes on Github from Steve Jones.
Deployment of SQL Server 2019 Always On Availability Groups on Azure AKS
Step through a demonstration illustrating a sample deployment of SQL Server 2019 Always On Availability Group cluster on Azure AKS. You'll discover how to leverage the Microsoft Azure-hosted managed Kubernetes service referred to as AKS.
What should you expect from a third-party monitoring tool?
Over 800 SQL Server professionals took part in the 2019 State of SQL Server Monitoring survey. Travis Hoffacker takes a look at the report and advises what is now expected of a third-party monitoring tool based on the responses from the community.
Blogs
Funny Money: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
While wandering around the documentation looking for some Question of the Day topics, I...
Why Database AI Agents need Layers?
By Arun Sirpal
Third part in my Ai series with databases. When building AI solutions within the...
Un-Migrating From the Cloud: T-SQL Tuesday #199
By Steve Jones
This month we have a very interesting invitation from Koen Verbeeck. He has hosted...
Forums
Backup Availability Group
Please I am hoping for some feedback Specifications: Windows Server 2022 SQL Server 2022...
How Do the Experts Become Experts?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Do the Experts Become...
Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments Level 4 – Preparing for Production Deployment
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments...
Question of the Day
Secure Communications
As of June 2026, what is the best version of TLS to use with SQL Server?
See possible answers