I get a lot of requests about which books are helpful to learn performance tuning and database design. I totally get that – I still like learning with books. It doesn’t mean training videos or blogs are any less cool. They can all work together.
Should you look at automatically created statistics on your tables in SQL Server to help you design better indexes? Learn why in this 20 minute video, or subscribe to the Dear SQL DBA podcast.
No time to watch? Scroll on down, everything is written in article form below the video.
Here’s this week’s question:
If you haven’t checked out Microsoft’s new WideWorldImporters sample database for 2016, it’s a pretty cool new little database. The database makes it easy to play around with new 2016 features, and it even ships with some cool little executables to run inserts in the “workload-drivers” folder.
This is one of those little details that confused me a ton when I was first working with execution plans.
One problem with learning to work with plans is that there’s just SO MUCH to look at. And it’s a bit spread out. So, even when looking at a single tooltip, things can be confusing.
Let’s talk about the nested loop operator, who can be particularly weird to understand.
SQL Server 2016 and Azure SQL Database have a lot of little perks. One little thing that changed is that the maximum key size allowed for nonclustered indexes was raised from 900 bytes to 1700 bytes.
What are the best tools to collect and baseline wait statistics? Should you write your own? Watch the 18 minute video or read the episode transcript below.
The tempdb database is a strange place in SQL Server.
Copyright (c) 2025, Catalyze SQL, LLC; all rights reserved. Opinions expressed on this site are solely those of Kendra Little of Catalyze SQL, LLC. Content policy: Short excerpts of blog posts (3 sentences) may be republished, but longer excerpts and artwork cannot be shared without explicit permission.