sarchasm (noun): the distance between your level of seriousness and my retort

The SQLBits call for speakers is out! Their speaker guidance is quite detailed, sitting down with a cup of coffee to absorb it and start thinking about the sessions I wanna submit: sqlbits.com/speak/

Query Exercise Answer: Generating Big TempDB Spills In last week's Query Exercise, I challenged you to play some code golf to generate big spills with tiny T-SQL. Today, I'm going to walk you through my thought process - the initial attempts I tried and failed with, and the discoveries I made…

What should you do about SQL Server memory dumps? www.brentozar.com/archive/2019...

I can't believe I have to say this out loud, but no, that NOLOCK hint on the table you're doing an UPDATE or DELETE on isn't helping. learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-... (And I've run into this 3 times in the last 3 weeks.)

This Is It! Our Black Friday Sale Ends Sunday. You work with Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, and Amazon RDS SQL Server. When people call in saying the server is slow, you're the one who has to take the call. It's up to you to figure out the bottleneck, which queries are causing that…

Reading about how Postgres 18 does index skip scans made me wonder whether Microsoft SQL Server has that feature, and boom, there goes an hour of my life writing demos. Next up, adding a module to the Mastering Index Tuning class to talk through it. www.pgedge.com/blog/postgre...

The First SQL ConstantCare Badges Just Went Out Ever wonder how big your database estate is compared to others? Whether you've got more servers, more databases, more workloads, or more problems? Well, if you're one of my SQL ConstantCare® customers, check your email: our first set of badges just…

WATCH AS WINDOWS INTEGRATES LOTUS 1-2-3 WITH MIAMI VICE www.youtube.com/watch?v=jW8t... WAIT DON'T ANSWER

The first few answers are coming in, and it's fun to see people working through it: T-SQL Query Exercise: Generate Big Spills www.brentozar.com/archive/2025...

Functions in the WHERE Clause Are Bad… Right? Nah, not necessarily. SQL Server's query optimizer behavior keeps changing with every freakin' version. Let's illustrate it with a simple query against the Stack Overflow Users table: CREATE INDEX Location ON dbo.Users(Location); GO SELECT COUNT(*)…

term of the day: vibe dbaing

sure you decorate but if you don't put the Christmas Lo-Fi Girl stream on 24/7 are you even alive www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4qJ...

Everything's going wrong today, so screw it - I'm quitting work at 3PM, having a glass of wine, and answering your database questions live on the stream, starting now: twitch.tv/brentozar

the perfect email signature line is here

T-SQL Query Exercise: Generate Big Spills When I was testing SQL Server 2025's new ability to limit TempDB usage with Resource Governor, I wrote a few fun diabolical demos. One of them was to generate giant spills to TempDB, quickly. When you're looking at an actual (not estimated) query plan, and…

Updated: Which Version of SQL Server Should You Use? www.brentozar.com/archive/2019...

SQL Server 2025 Is Out, and Standard Goes Up to 256GB RAM, 32 Cores! Today marks the official birthday of Microsoft SQL Server 2025. Here's where to download the evaluation version. Here are the top things you wanna consider as you talk to your managers, developers, and end users. The feature…

Microsoft SQL Server 2025 Developer Edition is available for download now: www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-se... Build appears to be 17.0.1000.7.

Flashback to one of SQL Server's more amusing bugs: if you were dumb enough to run UPDATE with a NOLOCK hint, you got database corruption: support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/... And frankly, you deserved that.

I Wish SQL Server Had These Four Innovations. I love SQL Server, and I'm excited for the release of 2025. I think the query processing keeps getting better, which means your apps are gonna go faster, with less code changes. The AI stuff is a little fluffy, and I don't think time will be kind to…

Reading: Starting Your First Data Warehouse: A Practical Learning Guide www.jamesserra.com/archive/2025...

How to Query JSON Data Quickly in SQL Server, Part 2: SQL Server 2025 SQL Server 2025 and .NET 10 bring several new improvements to storing JSON natively in the database and querying it quickly. On the SQL Server 2025 side, the two big ones are the new native JSON indexes and the new JSON_CONTAINS…

How to Query JSON Data Quickly in SQL Server, Part 1: Pre-2025 Before SQL Server 2025, if you want to store JSON data in Microsoft SQL Server or Azure SQL DB, and you want fast queries, the easiest way is to: Store the data in an NVARCHAR(MAX) column (because the native JSON datatype didn't arrive…

Dealt with *three* 30TB clients this week where this blog post was clutch: www.brentozar.com/archive/2015... If it takes you 6 hours to recover from an "oops" query, locking down permissions suddenly becomes a *big* deal.

Looking for a SQL Server job? Read the comments in this month's post, and it's readers who've posted jobs at their companies: www.brentozar.com/archive/2025...

Why Query Plans Can Look Different on Different Servers www.brentozar.com/archive/2019...

@brento.bsky.social your April Fool's post got into Google AI and now a someone selling consulting with "SQL Server Experts" on LinkedIn is writing about how excited his team is to test it. 🤦‍♀️ You did this on purpose, didn't you? 😂 Good job

[Video] Office Hours in Roatan, Honduras My cruise ship took a detour to Honduras to avoid the hurricane. Let's hang out on the beach and go through your top-voted questions from Here's what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:58 Dopinder: What is your opinion of the Github copilot support in SSMS 22? Is…

“UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE are not normally processed in parallel” www.brentozar.com/archive/2020...

The name Max Degrees of Parallelism is a vicious lie. It's more like Degrees of Parallelism: www.brentozar.com/archive/2020...

clearly it's time for layoffs

Who’s Hiring Microsoft Data People? November 2025 Edition Is your company hiring for a database position as of November 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…

that awkward moment where I finish writing a blog post, go to pick a title for it, Google it, and realize that I've already written about this topic, TWICE

It has come to my attention that some of y'all think that's a made-up fur coat that I'm wearing in one of my company illustrations. It is not. It was a faux fur that I tried on for laughs, and then we decided to send the pics to our illustrator.

there is really only ONE hard thing in computer science, and it's the Remember Me checkbox, but nobody ever remembers that, and I think that says something

Next Week, Start My Mastering Classes for Free! You're a developer, database administrator, or DBRE who's been working with SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, and Amazon RDS SQL Server for yeeears. You're jaded. You're confident. You're pretty sure you know what you're doing. You've never taken my…

In which I demo SQL Server 2025's new ABORT_QUERY_EXECUTION hint, which you can apply via Query Store to automatically prevent specific queries from ever running again: www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0Jv...

Black Friday Doorbusters End Today: Get In Before the Prices Go Up Welcome to my annual Black Friday sale, and I'm running special doorbuster deals to sweet talking you into taking the plunge quickly. On November 4, the Fundamentals bundle will go up to $295, and the Lifetime bundle will go up to…

Looks like Azure SQL DB Managed Instances Next-Gen General Purpose is finally out of preview. The preview warning labels are gone in the portal. Here's how to upgrade your existing instances: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/...

Black Friday Doorbusters Are Open Now, Closing Monday! You've been telling yourself, "One of these days, I'll finally take Brent's classes." Get ready, because that day is here: my Black Friday sale runs all November long, and it's my lowest prices all year! SQL Server 2025, 2022, and 2019 all…

My annual Black Friday sale is open now, with doorbuster deals til Monday! It's my lowest prices of the year on the database goodies you really want: www.brentozar.com/blackfriday/

[Video] Office Hours at Sea This Office Hours episode comes to you from Virgin Voyages' newest cruise ship, the Brilliant Lady, sailing through the Western Caribbean. We were originally scheduled to do the Eastern Caribbean, but Tropical Storm Melissa had other ideas, so they reworked our…

My home office, including the gear I use to do live streams and training classes: www.brentozar.com/archive/2025...

Flash back to 2009 when I finished the longest freshwater sailboat race in the world - dead last, hahaha. But hey, at least we finished: www.brentozar.com/archive/2009...

SQL ConstantCare® Population Report: Fall 2025 In this quarter's update of our SQL ConstantCare® population report, showing how quickly (or slowly) folks adopt new versions of SQL Server, the data is very similar to last quarter: SQL Server 2025: exactly 1 server being monitored, heh. God bless…

I highly recommend using this free planner to look back at your last year or so, and think about what you want to accomplish in the next one. Doesn't have to tie to December 31. yearcompass.com

Sitting on a cruise ship, reading a 2011 blog post about prepping for the very first SQLCruise: www.brentozar.com/archive/2011...

The Version Store Won’t Clear If ANY Database Has Open Transactions. Short story: what the title says. This is especially problematic for folks who merge multiple databases onto the same server. All it takes is one badly-behaving application to leave its transactions open, and suddenly it causes…

what’s that movie about trying to track down a runaway girl who listens to The Cure