It’s mid-February. New Year’s is gone, but it’s not springtime yet. Don’t get downtrodden – get inspired. Browse these articles and pick out one way you’re going to finish winter in rockstar style.
Never, ever, disable backups to fix a performance problem.
If you’re not having a performance crisis, you might look at that sentence and say, “Wow, that’s super dumb! Who would ever do that?”
Well, a lot of people, actually. It’s pretty common.
Your backups seem fine. They weren’t failing, the last time you checked. But trouble may be lurking.
Here’s the top 5 warning signs I’ve seen that backups haven’t been thought through.
Sometimes when SQL Server gets slow, developers and DBAs find that the problem is blocking. After lots of work to identify the query or queries which are the blockers, frequently one idea is to add ROWLOCK hints to the queries to solve the problem or to disable PAGE locks on the table. This often backfires - here’s why.
Before you do all the work to map out a complex sliding window table partitioning scheme for your SQL Server tables, here’s the top five questions I’d think through carefully:
Some folks think they need partitioning for performance– but it really shines as a data management feature. Just because you’ve got tables with millions of rows in them doesn’t necessarily mean that partitioning will make queries faster. Make sure you’ve worked through traditional indexing and query re-writes first. Partitioning is lots of work, so don’t skip this question.
It seems like this should be easy. But it’s not.
Over the years I’ve gotten lots of emails and questions from students that start like this:
Help! My partitioned table has the wrong data in a partition! It’s lopsided. I started trying to fix it, but…
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.