See how SQL Server 2025 uses Optional Parameter Plan Optimization to create separate plans for selective and unfiltered searches, how to verify the dispatcher and variants, and when dynamic SQL or recompilation is still the better choice.
2026-09-14
2,479 reads
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.
2026-09-14
Learn how the bitwise functions SET_BIT() and GET_BIT() can be used to manage data stored inside a single column.
2026-09-11
2,331 reads
Anyone who’s spent years writing T-SQL has a mental list of “why doesn’t SQL Server just do this already?” moments. Here are 9 of those from Louis Davidson’s perspective – a wish list of practical, coding-oriented feature requests drawn from real-world pain points.
2026-09-11
If you've spent years writing SQL for a living, you already know how this goes. Someone pings you on Teams asking, "How many active customers do we have in the Midwest this quarter?" There you are, back in the query editor, writing a JOIN you've written fifty times before. Genie Spaces in Databricks is built […]
2026-09-09
2,194 reads
Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server is designed to bring on-premises and multi-cloud SQL Server instances under centralized Azure management, but a newly documented privilege escalation technique shows how that same management workflow can be turned against the server it’s meant to protect.
2026-09-09
If you own a business application, you’re accountable for its uptime, its cost, and its performance, even if you’ve never opened SQL Server Management Studio in your life. But most guidance out there is written for DBAs, not for the people who actually make decisions about the app.
This webinar on Sept 16 is different. We’ll walk through real findings from real SQL Server environments — the kind of things that quietly cause slow page loads, failed backups, and surprise outages — and translate each one into what it actually means for you: What did it cost? What was the risk? What would you have needed to ask your team (or your vendor) to catch it sooner?
2026-09-09
tl;dr The title says it all. Prologue One of the keys to my personal learning is that, very early in my database career, I taught myself how to make lot’s of rows of Random Constrained Data in a comparatively short time. With the help of a few good folks over time, the method has been […]
2026-09-07 (first published: 2023-09-18)
6,054 reads
This guide has everything you need to know about JSON indexing in SQL Server 2025: what it is, how it works, and current limitations.
2026-09-07
See how SQL Server's Parameter Sensitive Plan optimization handles skewed parameters, how to verify dispatcher plans, and where PSP still falls short.
2026-09-04
3,664 reads
By James Serra
Microsoft shared a broad set of Fabric, Power BI, and SQL updates at FabCon...
By Steve Jones
No, I’m not quitting or retiring. Just going on vacation, but I leave tonight...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Let's Talk Certifications, which is...
Title pretty much says it. I want to join to a table that has...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Building a SQL Server Fleet...
I have this data in a table in a SQL Server 2025 database:
EmailAddressID EmailAddress 7 [email protected] 8 [email protected]If I run this query, which row(s) are returned?
SELECT top 10 * FROM person.EmailAddress WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(EmailAddress, '^D', 'i') AND BusinessEntityID IN (7,8)See possible answers