Execution plan operators, twelve of them, read the way the back page reads the stars. Find the one that rules your plan this month. Each sign comes with what it means and the one thing it’s asking you to check.
SQL Server 2025 Features, Ranked by How Much They Changed My Week
SQL Server 2025 features, ranked the way the music magazines rank albums. By whether they changed anything, not by how loud the launch was. Every entry below was tried on build 17.0.4085.5 before it earned a place. Three function probes came back unrecognised with this lab’s settings, and…
AI-Written SQL: The Query That Ran and Lied
Part six of ten. AI-written SQL fails in a way that plain bad code never does. It runs, it returns a number, and the number is wrong. Here is one that came out 28 times too big. The number While writing chapter 6 of my new book, I asked an…
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Find the Query That Ran at 3 a.m.: A Wanted Poster
How to find the query that ran at 3 a.m. after the fact. It uses nothing but what SQL Server 2025 keeps on its own. I planted a culprit, gave it eight disguises and buried it in four hundred innocent lookups. Then I tracked it down with Query Store. This is the poster.
Claude on SQL Server: Read, Prove, Then Change
Claude on SQL Server is safe when production gives it eyes and nothing else. This post splits the loop into three stages: start this week with a read-only login, make it a daily habit with a past cases library, then run it on a schedule with a second opinion. I tested the login on SQL Server 2025.
The Nightly Index Rebuild Job, 1998 to 2026: An Obituary
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.
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.