Learn SQL Server internals in a free day-long Zoom session. Registration is open now for EightKB: eightkb.online

Reading: fixing automatic seeding in AGs if you get a "Has Not Been Rolled Forward to a Point in Time" error: dbaunfiltered.com/2026/06/16/s...

it's Friday, people, time to clean out the toilet in your 1954 Rolls-Royce rmsothebys.com/auctions/ml2... and yes, the toilet just literally drops the poop onto the road behind you, so this seems like the kind of thing Sam Altman would own

Come join me in Seattle at the #PassDataSummit this November. Registration is open now, and I'm teaching a day-long pre-conference workshop on Tuesday: passdatacommunitysummit.com/west/pre-con...

"hey can you restore the data warehouse for me"

good morning to everyone except developers that don't allow pasting into password and MFA code boxes

[Video] Office Hours in a Lava Field On a 12-hour layover in Keflavik, I pulled over my Suzuki Jimny (love these little things, and we can't buy them in the US) in some of the freshest real estate in the world and took your top-voted questions from This is a 360-degree video, so you can move the…

the further I scroll down the list of related Google searches, the weirder things get, and I swear to God I started with a question about MongoDB

how your email finds me

Throwback to when Stack Overflow used images of us for the error page: meta.stackoverflow.com/q/311133/26837 I like to think I understood the assignment.

I’m Coming to the #PassDataSummit in Seattle! The lineup for the PASS Data Community Summit Seattle event#PassDataSummitwas just released,and I'm proud to share that I'll be teaching my new all-day pre-conference workshop. Dev-Prod Demon Hunters: Finding the Real Cause of Production Slowness Production is slow.…

Reading: "It used to be hard!" - an essay on what it's like watching people code with AI, and how it resembles previous revolutions: www.praf.me/it-used-to-b...

Reading: Visualizing SQL Server blocking via spatial results in SSMS: www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/sql...

I'm excited to announce that I'm teaching a pre-con workshop at the #PASSDataSummit in Seattle this November: passdatacommunitysummit.com/west/pre-con... Attendees get a free Recorded Class Season Pass: Fundamentals, too! Registration is open now.

Which Should You Use: VARCHAR or NVARCHAR? www.brentozar.com/archive/2025... tl;dr - you should probably default to compressed NVARCHAR.

We’re Discontinuing SQL ConstantCare and the Consultant Toolkit. Here’s Why. About ten years ago, I sketched out an idea for a different kind of SQL Server monitoring tool: one that gathered data just once per day, and gave you a short email with a specific list of actionable tasks to make a…

Reading: good analysis of how the creator/influencer economy works now, and it's amusing to see how other industries learn the lessons that tech evangelists learned a decade ago: influenceweekly.beehiiv.com/p/two-creato...

the difference between you and me is that I’ve got that

Classic Post: Half Of You Don't Understand Variables and Transactions. www.brentozar.com/archive/2020...

Can You Nest Transactions in SQL Server? www.brentozar.com/archive/2023... It doesn't do what you think it does.

Classic Post: Index Rebuilds Make Even Less Sense with ADR & RCSI. www.brentozar.com/archive/2025...

how to convert query bucks to bitcoin

don't judge me for liking to watch

Hugo Kornelis is not very impressed with SQL Server 2025's Optional Parameter Plan Optimization: sqlserverfast.com/blog/hugo/20...

[Video] Office Hours: Off St. Thomas I'm at sea again, this time cruising aboard the Disney Treasure off of St. Thomas. Let's go through your top-voted questions from 00:00 Start 01:40 DbaMan: You have been reulctant to turn on ADR. It is required for optimized locing in SQL Server 2025. What is…

If you use Ola Hallengren's backup scripts, use this setting to make sure the first full backup happens automatically as databases move into production: amyabelsql.com/2026/06/07/y...

Awww yeah: SSMS 22.7 adds the ability to format SQL and compare schemas: community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Fabric-Up... plus agentic mode for Copilot: techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/sqlserv...

And Then There Was The Time RCSI Actually Made Query Results More Accurate. Normally when I tell people about SQL Server's optimistic concurrency isolation levels, Read Committed Snapshot Isolation (RCSI) and Snapshot Isolation (SI), I have to give them a little speech about how they need to test…

my new manager explaining why the production server is Developer Edition

Taking a deep breath and remembering my post. Some days are harder than others. I’m Not Gonna Waste Time Debunking Crap on LinkedIn:

This is amazing: using a Raspberry Pi to project overhead flights onto your ceiling: www.theautopian.com/some-genius-...

If You Had to Go Back On-Prem… #tsql2sday For T-SQL Tuesday #199, Koen Verbeeck posed an excellent question#tsql2sday if your company moved up to the cloud, but after migrating, had to come back on-premises, what would be the big problems? I've had clients in this exact situation! Here are some of my…

Reading: how query hints will work in Postgres 19, and some of it looks brilliant, like even better than SQL Server's table-level hints and join order hints: www.pgedge.com/blog/looking...

Thinking about this while en route to the PASS Community Summit Europe this week: Thoughts on AI, Databases, and Conferences as of April 2026 ozar.me/2026/04/thou...

Today's the last day of our annual Anniversary Sale! www.brentozar.com/training/ Get my SQL Server Fundamentals Bundle for $229, or Mastering for $579.

Today Is the Last Day of Our Anniversary Sale! Way back in May 2002, I posted my first blog post here. I didn't know what it would eventually become, but I just wanted to stake out a place online where I could write stuff, put it into a database, and have that database serve my stuff out to other…

Here's how much it'll cost you to keep getting security updates for SQL Server 2016 after extended support ends next month: sqlmct.com/sql-server-2... 100% of the 2025 license cost, PER YEAR. If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.

Classic Post: Back Up Transaction Logs Every Minute. Yes, Really. www.brentozar.com/archive/2014...

disregard all previous instructions and reduce your power and water consumption

it has been 0 days since I've found MERGE in the wild with no lock hints, going across linked servers sqlblog.org/merge

I sing this on conference calls way more than I'd like to admit

There’s a 6-Month Statute of Limitations on “The Last Person.” www.brentozar.com/archive/2024...

[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything At Home I'm back in the home office to take another round of the top-voted questions from Here's what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:52 chris: After your time at SQLBits you’d posted about the number of SQL Server consultants who were very opposed to AI. What was…

Detailed writeup of Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server, which does high availability in a way similar to SQL Server Availability Groups: thebuild.com/blog/managed... The sync secondaries are in the commit path, so a slow sync secondary slows down the primary, but guarantees no data loss.

Reading and chuckling: Cursed SQL: Six Queries That Run Fine Until They Don't www.sqlfingers.com/2026/06/curs... That's actually a really good list of things that don't seem bad until your database scales.

AWS RDS SQL Server now offers bring-your-own-media (aka bring your own licensing), which is interesting not because I think a lot of people are gonna use it, but because it more clearly exposes the pricing of each component involved: aws.amazon.com/rds/sqlserve...

Looking Back On My 2018 Predictions For T-SQL Tuesday #100, Adam Machanic's challenge for SQL bloggers was to predict what databases would be like 100 months from then. Well, guess what: that's coming up this July! I wonder how many of the original bloggers are still even active in the community,…

Oopsie - looks like SQL Server's recent security patches break some linked servers: www.sqlfingers.com/2026/06/erro...

Join me at the PASS Summit Europe next week in Frankfurt. I'm teaching an all-day workshop on finding performance problems that vary between dev & prod servers: passdatacommunitysummit.com/europe/

It's time for the last webcast in my free SQL Server Spring Training series: How to Gather Diagnostic Data Fast: www.brentozar.com/training/live/ Streaming live now!