Setting up Free Blocking Alerts and Deadlock Monitoring (Dear SQL DBA Episode 17)
What tools in SQL Server will notify you about blocking and help track the queries behind your toughest blocking and deadlocking problems?
What tools in SQL Server will notify you about blocking and help track the queries behind your toughest blocking and deadlocking problems?
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.
Unique constraints and unique nonclustered indexes have a lot in common: unique constraints are implemented with a unique index behind the scenes.
While unique nonclustered indexes have a couple of additional features, I can still think of a scenario where it might be best to use unique constraints.
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.
You’d love to have a job tuning SQL Servers, but you don’t have an environment to practice in. Here’s how to teach yourself performance tuning and prepare yourself to land and succeed in job interviews.
You need to change an INT column to a BIGINT in a large table. Learn why this schema change can make your transaction log explode, and how to avoid it.
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.