Blogs

I recently posted on LinkedIn that I was interviewing for a SQL Server database administrator role for the first time in a long time. I invited folks: “Ask me your favorite interview question!”

Stephen Vakil had a great one: “when should you use SQL Server to store your data?”

For situations where SQL Server is already in use and there’s a relatively low barrier to entry, I think it’s simpler to turn this question around and ask, “When is SQL Server not a good choice for storing your data?”

This post is also available as a podcast episode, and on YouTube.

Career navigation in the time of tech layoffs

in Career

May 23, 2023

Reorganizations and layoffs are now commonplace in the tech industry: a daily occurrence. It’s increasingly necessary for tech workers mentally prepare for potential job loss and uncertainties that arise. It’s a common antipattern to believe that it’s “too late” to prepare for a layoff or unexpected reorganization if a layoff has already occurred in your organization.

It’s never too late, and it’s always the right time these days to start mentally preparing yourself for change– because there’s reliably another change around the corner.

Chat GPT says SSMS is the best SQL Server monitoring tool

in AI, monitoring, sql server, ssms

May 3, 2023

One thing I enjoy about AI chatbots is that they can help me recognize when I’ve missed something obvious.

Use ChatGPT to see multiple perspectives. An example: ORMs and database code

in GPT, GenerativeAI

January 24, 2023

There’s a lot of hype, concern, and fear regarding generative AI lately. Tools like ChatGPT are so good at generating groups of words that it feels like magic– however, generative AI doesn’t have the ability to understand or verify the language it generates. For example, it’s been used to write news stories for CNET – but sometimes included facts that are just plain wrong.

One positive use case of a generative AI tool like ChatGPT is to ask it to make a case for different perspectives than your own, and use this as a starting point to broaden your understanding – with the knowledge that we need to verify everything ChatGPT tells us. As an example, let’s chat to ChatGPT about Object Relational Mapping tools (ORMs).

3 lessons learned about Azure SQL Database

in sql, AzureSQL

January 15, 2023

Hosted cloud databases make a lot of administrative tasks easier, or take care of them for you altogether.

But here are three things that I’ve found a little too easy to forget about Azure SQL Database.

New article on performance tuning with the missing indexes feature in SQL Server

in indexes, sql

March 18, 2022

We’ve just published a new article in the SQL docs, Tune nonclustered indexes with missing index suggestions . The article explains what the missing index feature is, limitations of the feature, and how to use missing index DMVs and missing index suggestions in Query Store to tune indexes.

Find query execution timeouts with Query Store

in sql, query store

March 11, 2022

During a discussion of troubleshooting query timeouts in Azure SQL Database recently, I thought – hey, I wonder if you can find queries that timed out in Query Store?

Turns out, you can.

Index design guide updated: index types, B+ trees, and row locators, oh my

in sql

February 23, 2022

We’ve recently updated the SQL Server and Azure SQL index architecture and design guide. This article is an in-depth guide to indexing in databases using the SQL Server engine, including SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure Synapse Analytics.

Our recent update adds a table to categorize the types of indexes discussed in the article, clarifies B-trees vs B+ trees, and describes how row locators (aka “secret columns”) are used in nonclustered indexes.

Workers vs. requests in Azure SQL Database

in sql, AzureSQL

January 18, 2022

We now explicitly define ‘requests’ and ‘workers’ in the Azure SQL Database documentation, and we’ve cleaned up multiple places where we used to equate the two terms. In this post, I share the history of the two terms when it comes to Azure SQL Database, why the two were ever equated, and why things like this are tricky to change.

What I learned writing about how to diagnose and troubleshoot high CPU in Azure SQL Database

in [Azure SQL Database]

January 5, 2022

Writing helps me learn. In my job as a Content Developer, this is more true than ever: there’s a fantastic group of folks, both in the Database Docs team and in the Microsoft Data Platform engineering team, who review and contribute to content.

I’ve just had the pleasure of publishing my first new article in the Microsoft Docs, Diagnose and troubleshoot high CPU on Azure SQL Database.