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.
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.
Text to SQL: The SQL Was Never the Hard Part
Text to SQL works now, on real schemas, with joins and window functions. I watched three companies hand it to their business users, and all three quietly stopped. The SQL was never the hard part. The hard part is knowing which table is real and which meaning of the word you meant.
The Migration of a Row: Tagged, Followed, Found Again
I followed the migration of a row through SQL Server 2025, from the first write to the grave. The log gets there before the table. The delete does not erase anything. And when the table is empty and the ghost is gone, the statistics histogram still names the row in full.
Ten AI Phrases We Use Too Often
In 2013 I wrote a small list of phrases developers used too often. Twelve years later, here are ten AI phrases I hear every week, and what each one means.