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.
The Understudy: A Story About the Human in the Loop
Fiction. The understudy is the person paid to stay ready. Every night a system settles millions of payments in seconds. Four times a year one person does the same work by hand, on paper, against the clock, so that the ability to do it still exists somewhere in the building.
The SQL Advisor: Seven Answers, All Measured
The SQL Advisor answers seven letters with measurements instead of opinions. Table variables, what each index costs on insert, shrinking after a big delete, SELECT star, ORDER BY in a view, heaps, and whether the order of your WHERE predicates matters.
Know Your Wait Types: Six Profiles, All Induced
I caused six wait types on purpose, one at a time, and measured each one for a single session. What each is blamed for, what it actually means, and the numbers it produced on SQL Server 2025. Wait types are the most misread figures in the product.
Why AI Sounds Confident When It’s Wrong
Part three of ten. A wrong answer from a model sounds exactly like a right one. That single fact explains most of the damage AI does at work. Here are five interview answers that prove you already know it. Look at that grid for a second. Three of those four…
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AI Productivity Gains Went Up and Nothing Shipped Faster
AI productivity gains went up on every dashboard, and the release notes are the same length as last year’s. Writing code was never the constraint. Speed up one station and you get a taller pile in front of the station that is. Here is how to time your own line.
Tribal Knowledge: Nobody Left to Ask
Tribal knowledge is the part of the job nobody writes down, and it leaves when the person leaves. I sat with a team that could not tell me whether they were allowed to change four lines of billing code. The assistant at the end of the table had read every line and could not say why those lines were there.