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Three blog posts a week, plus a Monday roundup of my favorite database news from around the web. No fluff, occasional jokes.
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The Fundamentals of Index Tuning, Query Tuning, and Server Tuning have all been updated as of July 2026, reflecting the latest advancements in the First Responder Kit, AI, and SQL Server 2025. They're perfect for folks who have never been to a formal training class, but are responsible for performance on SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, and Amazon RDS.
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See consultingNOLOCK is bad and you probably shouldn't use it, but every time I mention that publicly, the pushback just keeps coming. I don't know why people so firmly believe that their situation couldn't possibly be affected by bad/random data from NOLOCK.
Today's misconception comes from a LinkedIn commenter telling me it's safe to use if you're doing index seeks. Hoo boy. Let's whip up a table with an index:
For this episode, I'm up in the mountains just outside Vegas, enjoying the nice cool temperatures, spending the weekend at Mount Charleston. Let's go through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN31TnYVdgI
By popular demand, SQL Server 2025 added JSON indexes. You can eat the cake of being able to store practically schema-less JSON blobs as part of each row, and have it too by querying specific values quickly. (The common phrase is to "have your cake and eat it too", but did you ever think about…
When you run monitoring queries like sp_BlitzWho and sp_WhoIsActive, you wanna see the program names that are running the queries. It's super useful when you've got multiple apps running on the same servers, or when you've got apps scattered across end user computers.
If you don't set the program names, you'll either end up with empty strings, or your dev tool's default name, like Core .Net SqlClient Data Provider, which doesn't tell you jack.
