This week's top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento finds us opening ChatGPT multiple times! It's fun to show how I use it, and what it thinks of me.
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You've heard that page splits are bad, and they're an indication that your table design is making your storage work too hard. You've heard that the right answer to fix it is adjusting fill factor lower, or doing regular index maintenance.
Before you watch the below animation, you'll wanna get up to speed with how index seeks work. Then, let's explain page splits with an animation:
For this month's T-SQL Tuesday, I invited y'all to tell me how you know a query's gonna be bad when you open it. Riccardo Perico and Shane O'Neill says WHILE loops and/or CURSORs are pretty good indicators. I agree, because especially when you're opening code in the year 2026, and someone still hasn't figured this out…
This isn't specifically database-related, but it's the kind of thing I'm really into, so maybe you're into it too.
I sat down with Giovana Carvalho, the Managing Director at Teachable, the e-commerce platform I use to sell training classes, and we chatted about what AI is good for these days, and where its rough edges are.
In my free How to Think Like the Engine class, I gloss over the entire concept of B-trees and just hand-wavily say "SQL Server can seek to the page that has the row you're looking for." That's always kinda bothered me, so I finally gave in to temptation and whipped up an animated example of a clustered index on the Users table:
I was in Rome to attend a teaching conference, and my AirBnB had the most beautiful view overlooking Rome and Vatican City. While having my morning coffee, I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento - and I didn't go through many questions because some of them required really long answers, and I had a great time with those.
From now on, I'm going to be releasing annual versions of the First Responder Kit, starting with this one, which I'm calling the First Responder Kit 2026. I'll still release more frequently on Github, but I won't be blogging about it here. I want to make it easier for folks who don't update that often.…
Tomorrow's your last day to join about a dozen of your closest friends - well, you're gonna be close soon - attending my live online fall rotation of all-new classes, starting with next week's Fundamentals Week 2026:
Fundamentals Week - July 13-17 - covering Fundamentals of Index Tuning, Query Tuning, and Server Tuning
Mastering Index Tuning - Aug 31-Sept 4
Mastering Query Tuning - Sept 28-Oct 2
Mastering Server Tuning - Oct 19-23
After the PASS Data Community Summit in Frankfurt, Germany, I headed back to Iceland and spent a few more days gallivanting around the country in a Tesla Model Y camper. (Well, "camper" is a glamorous word for it: CampEasy.com puts a mattress in the back. But still.) Today, I'm at Djúpalónssandur, a marvelous black pebble…
I open it up and the first thing I see is a comment with a changelog showing a long list of dates and author initials.
Oh I know, you think documentation is a good thing, but:
I work with databases for a living.
I teach people, and I help them via consulting.
Prefer listening to this via podcast? Good news! You can now subscribe to Office Hours on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Podcast Index, Podcast Addict, Podchaser, and anywhere else fine podcasts are sold. One of my most favorite spots on earth is Jökulsárlón and Diamond Beach. The glacier Vatnajokull is slowly melting into the sea, and pieces…
Is your company hiring for a database position as of July 2026? 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:
Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 22.7 added the ability to format your T-SQL queries by right-clicking and clicking Format SQL, or by hitting control-K, control-Q on your keyboard:
You're probably not going to like the default formatting out of the box because you're the kind of person who has strong, passionate feelings and likes to argue about them on the Internet. Good news! The configurations are really flexible. Go into Tools, Options, SQL Formatter:
Years ago, when I used to sell a Live Class Season Pass, I sold it year long.
All year long, you could hop into my online store and enroll in my live classes. From the moment you enrolled, you could immediately start attending the very next online class, no matter what the topic was, or how senior it was.
Iceland has some pretty famous waterfalls, from Þórufoss and Skógafoss in Game of Thrones, to Háifoss in Stranger Things, to Dettifoss in Prometheus, and more. However, probably the most-photographed one is Seljalandsfoss, partially because of its easy access from the Ring Road, and partially because of, uh, Justin Bieber's video for I'll Show You. That video is also a pretty good intro to the greatest hits of Iceland's south coast.
We're discontinuing our apps (not the First Responder Kit scripts, just the apps), which means I'm laying off Richie Rump, my developer that's worked with me for the last decade.
Calling him "my developer" doesn't do justice to Richie's role here, and he's really humble, so I wanted to lay out the top 5 reasons you should hire him.
Way back in December of 2009, Adam Machanic published a blog post (archive) in which he invited database bloggers to participate in a new monthly event he called T-SQL Tuesday. Each month, he (or a blogger he picked) proposed a topic, and on that date, we'd all publish our blog posts at the same time. It was a fun way to get a variety of opinions about a topic.
I used to run live online classes all year round, and I really miss it. I've had such a good time at conferences lately, and I feel like it's time to bring the live stuff back. Plus I don't know about you, but I have a heck of a hard time paying attention to recorded…
On a 12-hour layover in Keflavik, I pulled over my Suzuki Jimny (love these little things, and we can't buy them in the US) in some of the freshest real estate in the world and took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. This is a 360-degree video, so you can move the camera angle around with your mouse.
