I'm back in the home office this week, covering your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento, and we finish up the session with a discussion of the stoic habit I use to start my mornings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odkrYIQKaMA
No no, I'm not just talking about the people answering the interview question.
I'm talking about the people asking the question.
Is your company hiring for a database position as of September 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:
SQL Server Agent is a solid scheduler for database administration and simple, database-local automation. In a small to midsize shop, it is the right tool for backing up databases, checking for corruption, and maintaining statistics.
But as a shop grows in complexity, Agent starts running into its limits, and teams find themselves duct-taping together workarounds to cover the gaps.
Normally when you're looking at an execution plan, and you see an index seek followed by a key lookup, that means it's running relatively quickly.
To explain, let's take the Users table in the Stack Overflow database and run this query that we explained in this post:
You wanna learn PostgreSQL, and you wanna use a sample database with big real-world data, the same kinds of issues that pop up with real-life data distribution skew, and fun query challenges.
StackOverflow.com provides a free data dump in XML format with their data as of 2024-04. The data is licensed under cc-by-sa 4.0, which means whenever you use it for public demos, you'll need to link back to their original data source there, just as I did.
Ten years ago, I published a blog post with the top 10 most highly upvoted requests for Microsoft SQL Server as shown on their feedback site at the time, Connect.Microsoft.com. That site has gone out to a nice farm upstate, but let's revisit that top 10 list to see whether Microsoft actually built what you wanted.
This week, I'm back in Vegas, spending time in the home bar to recover from jet lag. I'm not saying booze is the best way to recover - but - it helps me fall asleep after a 16-hour-time-zone-jump, and it makes the career answers a lot more colorful. Let's go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
Wanna play some Texas Hold 'Em style poker and make a pile of Query Bucks? Wanna watch other database people playing?
Fire up SSMS and connect to:
What's the difference between SQL Server's row compression and page compression, and when does each one make sense?
Row compression turns every fixed-length datatype into a variable-length datatype, using as little space as possible to store it
Page compression does that, AND adds a dictionary of repeated data on the page, getting more compression at the cost of more CPU
I've got a special treat for you today! I was cleaning out my garage and you'll never guess what I found!
That's right: it's an original SQL Server debugger console!
I'm back at the People's Park in Zhengzhou, Yves' hometown, watching retirees be active while I lounge around and take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
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.
When the new MiniMax H3 image-to-video model dropped this month, I was really impressed with how quickly and easily it was able to make 5-10 second videos from a starting image - not in the cloud, mind you, but on my own home computer gear:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Dbl8udOEq_d/
You've probably heard of the setting Max Degree of Parallelism. I hate that name: it should really be called just plain ol' Degrees of Parallelism, and here's why. There are a lot of conflicting opinions out there about how to set it, and Microsoft has official guidance about it in that article above. It's basically set…
Common Table Expressions are awesome because they let SQL Server reorder processing in whatever way it deems to be the most efficient for your current data distribution, on your current version of SQL Server. Default to CTEs.
When SQL Server gets that process wrong, switch to temp tables.
Today I'm hanging out in the dining room, or what would normally be a dining room, but we use it to store a 1992 Honda Beat. I explain why, and then take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. The audio on this one is a little tinny - the room is super-echo-y and I don't think the camera picked up my lapel microphone. Sorry about that!
Over the years, tables - like your waistline - tend to get bigger. We keep tacking on more and more columns, one at a time, in order to handle app needs. It's easier to add "just one more column" than it is to break things off into a whole separate table. When you're only handling…
Is your company hiring for a database position as of August 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:
Every SQL Server performance tuner eventually faces the same question: is this normal, or is something wrong?
The answer starts with 3 numbers about your SQL Server:
I'm in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area today, hanging out in the triple-digit heat, to answer your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
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.
