Blogs

Overheard: “I just think there’s not that many women who enjoy coding. And I say that based on my daughter, too.”

I’m at the Microsoft MVP Summit in Redmond, Washington this week. This is a great event for learning from the folks building amazing new technology at Microsoft, giving feedback and representing the community, and meeting and learning from other MVPs from around the world.

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Forced Plan Confusion: Is_Forced vs Use Plan = True

Identifying that a query plan has been bossed around in Query Store can be a bit tricky, because it can appear in different ways.

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Why I Love the Automatic Plan Correction Auto-Tuning Feature

I’m thrilled to have just finished and published a new course on Automatic Tuning in SQL Server. This feature is available in SQL Server 2017+ and Azure SQL Database.

Update: this course is now open and totally free to all.

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Infographic: Conference Prep for Anxious Folk

I’m honored to be heading to the Microsoft MVP Summit. I really enjoy this conference– it’s not my first time going, so I know the ropes. I’m looking forward to seeing a bunch of old friends AND to connect to lots and lots of new people.

But even though I am familiar with the conference, I have a list of things I do to get ready and prepare. That’s because…

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Using YouTube Captions & Transcript to Find Content in a Long Video

This week, I was pretty pumped to see that PASS published Erin Stellato (twitter) and Dejan Krakovic’s (linked in) excellent session on Query Store to the public. I attended this session live at the conference, and I remembered that there was one specific part on memory limits in Query Store that I wanted to watch again. I’d jotted down a note about it, but things were flying by and my note was gibberish.

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When Should I Use Explicit Transactions for Single Statements?

I got a great question about transactions by email recently about transactions.

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New SQLChallenge: Defuse the Deadlock

When I first created SQLWorkbooks, I distilled what it was all about down into one sentence: “Learn SQL Server by Solving Problems.”

This month, I introduce my first SQLChallenge, which distills that down into practice. The SQLChallenge features 23 minutes of video with scripts that you can use to reproduce and solve the problem yourself.

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When Were Statistics Last Updated for a Heap?

I got a question last week from a very smart fellow:

How can I tell when statistics were last updated for a heap?

Before I could email him back, I soon got another email in which he answered his own question.

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How I Accidentally Found a Passion for Plants (#TSQL2sDay 99)

For TSQL Tuesday #99, @AaronBertrand gave us an invitation to write about something we’re passionate about outside of SQL Server.

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