Splitting GUIDs into multiple numbers in an attempt to get faster columnstore queries: forrestmcdaniel.com/2025/09/29/a... I love the creativity of this.

I'm teaching a bunch of my Fundamentals training for free next month! Sign up here: www.brentozar.com/archive/2025...

Who’s Hiring Microsoft Data People? October 2025 Edition Is your company hiring for a database position as of October 2025? Do you wanna work with the kinds of people who read this blog? Let's make a love connection. If your company is hiring, leave a comment. The rules: Your comment must include…

Estimated and Actual Plans Can Have Different Shapes. www.brentozar.com/archive/2022... With real examples to illustrate how they change.

When Always On Isn’t: Handling Outages in Your Application www.brentozar.com/archive/2017... Stack Overflow did a brilliant job of building this into their site, and if you wanna do something similar, it's up to you to do it.

Which Should You Use: VARCHAR or NVARCHAR? You're building a new table or adding a column, and you wanna know which datatype to use: VARCHAR or NVARCHAR? If you need to store Unicode data, the choice is made for you: NVARCHAR says it's gonna be me. But if you're not sure, maybe you think, "I…

5 Questions to Ask When You Upgrade SQL Server www.brentozar.com/archive/2019... Things to think about as we approach SQL Server 2025's release date.

Why You’re Tuning Stored Procedures Wrong (the Problem with Local Variables) www.brentozar.com/archive/2014...

a little breathing room please

Set MAXDOP in Azure SQL DB or You’ll Get This Cryptic Error. Max Degrees of Parallelism (MAXDOP) tells the database engine, "If you decide to parallelize a query, go parallel with this many worker threads." (It's a little more complex than that - there is also a coordinating thread, plus a single…

Three Reasons to (Temporarily) Change Max Worker Threads: www.brentozar.com/archive/2020...

The Copilot I wish SSMS had: www.brentozar.com/archive/2024...

Here Are the YouTube Channels We Both Loved. Last week, I announced that we've hit 50,000 YouTube subscribers, and I celebrated by letting y'all submit your favorite YouTube channels in the comments, and 5 of you would win my Fundamentals & Mastering Class Bundle. You did not disappoint. First,…

Classic Post: SQL Server Suddenly Frozen? You Might Be Snapshotting Too Many Databases. www.brentozar.com/archive/2020...

Confession: I recommended that a 5GB database get split up. www.brentozar.com/archive/2017...

SQL Server needs a dog. www.brentozar.com/archive/2011...

[Video] Consulting Lines: teaching you how to talk like a politically correct consultant: www.brentozar.com/archive/2024...

We Hit 50,000 YouTube Subscribers! Let’s Run a Contest. This is kinda amazing to me: our YouTube channel has broken the 50,000 subscriber mark! That's wild to me because I don't put "please like and subscribe" type stuff in the videos, and I don't try to build viral content. I just show up every…

Rather than disagreeing with someone who's operating on old knowledge, try this line instead: www.brentozar.com/archive/2011...

It's time to learn how I use the First Responder Kit for SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, and Amazon RDS SQL Server, streaming live now: www.brentozar.com/training/live/ Stop wasting time fumbling around with your database. You look like a teenager in the back seat of your car.

Flash back to answering a DBA quiz about 2 mistakes I made in my career: www.brentozar.com/archive/2008... And I find it funny (and sad) that almost every blog I linked to has since gone by the wayside.

Microsoft Now Recommends You Set Max Memory to 75% and Min Memory to 0%. Somehow I missed this a few years ago, and I bet a lot of y'all did too. Note the new "Recommended" column in the memory settings documentation: These recommendations are also set by the SQL Server 2022 setup wizard if you…

Flash back to what it was like being a software "evangelist" in 2009, traveling internationally, and having everything go wrong: www.brentozar.com/archive/2009...

I wish I didn't have to know about the list of known issues with Azure Managed Instances, and I hope you don't have to know about it either, but in case you do: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/...

Announcing Free Fundamentals Week 2025! You're a developer, analyst, database administrator, or anybody else working with SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, or Amazon RDS SQL Server. You want to learn how to make your databases go faster. Good news! In October 13-16, I'm teaching totally free half-day…

Flash back to the live streaming setup I was using in 2021, streaming from Iceland during the pandemic: www.brentozar.com/archive/2021...

There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that SQL Server 2025's Express Edition will be renamed Air.

pushing my changes to production

“…my boyfriend, Chad…. ChadGPT”

[Video] Office Hours: Database Questions & Answers In between clients, I hopped onto my Twitch channel to take your top-voted questions from If you'd like to get notified whenever I do one of those live streams, you can follow my channel for free and you'll get email notifications automatically. I…

swear to god, microsoft, really

Your Developers Need Cheap SQL Training. Your developers haven't ever been to formal Microsoft database training on SQL Server or Azure SQL DB. They're struggling with trying to tune queries and indexes. Your apps keep getting slower as the data grows, and your queries keep getting more complex.…

SQL Server 2025 Makes Memory Troubleshooting Easier. 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. To show how it works, let's run a bunch of…

I'm streaming live in 10 minutes with your first official Microsoft database internals class, the stuff I wish someone had told me about how they work: www.brentozar.com/training/live/ It's time for How to Think Like the Engine, Live!

ahhh psst github.com/marktolson/p... (no one's gonna get that reference but me and Richie, and that's okay)

The computer you want costs at least $3,000. It always has, and it always will. You can get one for cheaper, but it's not the one you really want.

OpenAI to Oracle: "hey we're gonna pay you $300B for compute" (Oracle stock zooms up) Oracle to Bytedance: "Hey we're gonna use our stock money to buy TikTok from you" Bytedance: "Okay, but no algorithm" Oracle to OpenAI: "hey we're gonna pay you $300B for algorithms" (OpenAI stock zooms up)

Get my new Smart Postgres training for your entire team for just $995 - but only if you buy before October 1: smartpostgres.com/posts/get-po...

Free Webcasts Tomorrow & Wednesday I'm teaching my two most important classes live, online, completely free! These are the two fundamentals classes that I think everybody should start with, regardless of their experience with SQL Server or Azure SQL DB. I'll teach you the most important parts…

Release announcement for Spiral, an intriguing-sounding database whose file format is designed for fast ingestion by GPUs: spiraldb.com/post/announc... Not relevant for me or my work, but interesting to read about.

[Blog] Postgres Surprise #1: There Is No Clustered Index. smartpostgres.com/posts/postgr... And no, the CLUSTER command doesn't do what you think it does.

AI pro tip: start your questions with, "In the style of Joan Rivers, explain to me why..." Other characters I love to use: Anthony Bourdain, Dave Chappelle, and Captain Jack Sparrow.

Houstonians! I'm coming to town on November 7th to teach a 1-day class on Mastering Query Tuning. Grab your tickets now: training.brentozar.com/p/mastering-...

I'm at the point where I have a keyboard macro to paste the same exact text into Copilot every time, and it goes like this:

Bostonians! I'm coming to town this month, and you can buy tickets to see my 1-day session on Faster, Cheaper Cloud Databases: sqlsaturday.com/2025-09-27-s...

I'm streaming live now! Ask me anything about Microsoft databases here: pollgab.com/room/brento/ and tune in for the live stream: twitch.tv/brentozar

[Video] Office Hours on the Beach in Cancun In retrospect, I should have put on sunscreen - even for just a 20-minute Office Hours session on the beach! Dang, that sun is powerful. Let's go through your top-voted questions from This is a 360-degree video, so if you watch it on YouTube, you'll be…

No, Accelerated Database Recovery Doesn’t Fix NOLOCK. I have never seen a T-SQL feature that people love as much as NOLOCK. I keep thinking I've written enough blog posts about it, but a client came up with a new one: We use SQL Server 2022's Accelerated Database Recovery, which keeps copies of…

The Big Data Lebowski