The nightly index rebuild job has died after a long illness. It was born in 1998 to a hard disk that could not seek. It never believed the disk had been replaced. It is survived by page density, which did most of its work all along.
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T-SQL Mistakes: Careless and Careful Write the Same Six Queries
T-SQL mistakes, in the two-panel format the children’s magazines used. Careless writes it one way. Careful writes it the other. Every pair was run on the same 1,200,000 rows on SQL Server 2025 and measured. One pair returned a wrong answer. One I stopped after fourteen minutes of CPU.
The Halloween Server Shadow: Spot the Impossible One
The Halloween server shadow puzzle hides one mismatched cable. Look at three racks and choose the shadow that cannot belong.
AI Interview Questions Test You, Not the Machine
AI interview questions test whether you can explain something out loud. Cardinal can produce an answer. Cardinal cannot be asked.
Slow Queries: A Field Guide to Eight Species
Slow queries, identified the way a field guide identifies birds: by silhouette, habitat, call, and the species they’re confused with. All eight were raised in the lab on SQL Server 2025. The reads and the wait types are what each one produced.
Embeddings and Vectors: The Map of Meaning
Part four of ten. Search used to mean matching words. Embeddings let a system match meaning instead, and almost every AI feature that touches your data stands on that one idea. 1. What is an embedding? An embedding is a list of numbers that stands for the meaning of a…
Continue ReadingThe Query Optimizer Interview: Twenty Minutes, No Hints
The query optimizer sat down for twenty minutes and answered for itself. Why it ignored your index, why one procedure gets a plan built for the wrong caller, what it does when it cannot see your value, and the moment its own plan admits it stopped looking.
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