Every time I share a recommendation to use data compression in SQL Server to reduce physical IO and keep frequently accessed data pages in memory, I hear the same concern from multiple people: won’t this increase CPU usage for inserts, updates, and deletes? DBAs have been trained to ask this question by many trainings and a lot of online content – I used to mention this as a tradeoff to think about, myself– but I’ve found this is simply the wrong question to ask.

tldr; I’ve published a script to loop through all databases on an instance, identify if there are any query plans in a problematic “failed” forced state (which can hurt query performance), and un-force them if found. Get the dbo.dba_QueryStoreUnforceFailed stored procedure on GitHub. This script is designed to work on SQL Server on-prem, in a VM, or in Azure SQL Managed Instance or SQL Server RDS. Since the script is instance-level and loops through all databases, this isn’t really designed for Azure SQL Database – and you don’t get a SQL Agent there anyway, so you probably want to change this around for that use case.

Shrinking databases in SQL Server isn’t fun – it’s slow, it causes blocking if you forget to use the WAIT_AT_LOW_PRIORITY option, and sometimes it persistently fails and refuses to budge until you restart the instance. You only want to shrink a SQL Server database when you’ve got a good reason and a lot of patience.

If you’re using Azure SQL Managed Instance and you haven’t already used data compression on your indexes and shrunk your databases, you probably have two good reasons to do both of those things: performance and cost reduction.

At times when shrinking a data file in a SQL Server or Azure SQL Managed Instance/Database, shrink operations may persistently fail with the error:

Msg 1119, Level 16, State 1, Line 11 Removing IAM page ([filenumber]:[pagenumber]]) failed because someone else is using the object that this IAM page belongs to. DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed error messages, contact your system administrator.

There’s not much documented on this error anywhere that I can find, so I’m sharing my experience with this error. tldr: I was not able to get past this without restarting the SQL Server service.

Joins are essential. The SQL Corgs introduce you to INNER joins in this animated short.

Why do we “normalize” relational databases, and what are the basics? Awkward Unicorn explains, with a little help from their friends.

Freyja the corgi shares her tips for learning SQL: SELECT, FROM, and WHERE.

Now that I’m getting the hang of this, I think I’m going to do a whole series of shorts on SQL syntax essentials, plus tips and tricks!

I learned to make short form videos with my drawings this week, and, well… things are about to get weirder.