ChatGPT Says SSMS Is the Best SQL Server Monitoring Tool

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

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New Article on Performance Tuning with the Missing Indexes Feature in SQL Server

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.

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Find Query Execution Timeouts with Query Store

During a discussion of troubleshooting query timeouts in Azure SQL Database recently, I wondered: can you find queries that timed out in Query Store?

You can.

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Index Design Guide Updated: Index Types, B+ Trees, and Row Locators, Oh My

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.

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Gotchas with Deferred Name Resolution in SQL Server: Stored Procedures, Synonyms, Views, and Functions

Have you ever tried to create an object in SQL Server, but it failed due to a missing table, column, or other dependency? If so, you’ve hit a case where SQL Server doesn’t offer ‘deferred name resolution’.

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Managing Drift in Automated Deployments to SQL Server Databases

One big gotcha that teams often encounter when automating deployments for databases is that it’s difficult (or sometimes impossible) to ensure that all changes to the production database are performed through the automation pipeline.

These out-of-band changes case the production database to “drift” away from the schema as defined in version control.

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How to Enable TCP/IP in SQL Server Developer Edition, Even If the Configuration Manager Is Missing

SQL Server’s Developer Edition installs with a different default network protocol configuration than Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition.

Fixing this has gotten more complicated because it’s become common for the SQL Server Configuration Manager to not be installed on a developer’s workstation in an easily accessible way.

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