Every year, Stack Overflow runs a developer survey about technology, work, community, and more. This year’s results include 65,437 responses from developers around the world. The results are biased towards the kinds of developers who use Stack Overflow – 76% of the respondents reported that they have a Stack Overflow account. I would guess that ..read more

While taking a dip in Cabo, I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaHImrIMM6Y Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 01:00 OpportunityKnocking: What are your thoughts on when to implement a NoSQL strategy over traditional RDBMS for large enterprise-wide database platform solutions? I see scalability advantages in using NoSQL but do you see this ..read more

In last week’s Query Exercise, we added a user-defined function to the Users table to check whether their WebsiteUrl was valid or not. I noted that even with an index on Reputation, SQL Server 2022 simply ignored the index, did a table scan, and spent 2 minutes of time calling the user-defined function on a row-by-row basis. First off, a disclaimer: I didn’t write that exercise with a goal of showing the difference between old & new SQL Server versions, between old & new compatibility levels. However, several folks in the comments said, “Hey, I’m on an older version, on an older compat ..read more

Last night, two major IT disasters struck: Microsoft Azure’s Central region went down for about 4 hours. The official post-mortem isn’t out yet, but rumor has it that while decommissioning legacy storage services, the product group deleted the wrong thing. Crowdstrike pushed a bad update, leading to blue screens of death on Windows systems worldwide, affecting banking, healthcare, airlines, and more. If you were affected by one of those outages, you have my warmest virtual hug. At times like this, the stress level can be really tough, and I hope you can take care of yourself. Remember that y ..read more

On a pleasantly mild morning, I sat down on the patio and took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.   Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 00:56 MyTeaGotCold: When going in to a database blind, do you worry at all about its compatibility level? I see a lot of unloved databases that are still on 2008’s level, but the tiny potential for breaking changes makes me scared to touch it. 02:01 Vishnu: For boxed SQL, Is it ok for users to create SQL agent jobs that run periodic business logic and/or email end users? 02:59 Karthik: What’s your opinion of live query plan v ..read more

Take any size of the Stack Overflow database and check out the WebsiteUrl column of the Users table: Sometimes it’s null, sometimes it’s an empty string, sometimes it’s populated but the URL isn’t valid. Let’s say that along the way, someone decided to ask ChatGPT to build a function to check for valid website URLs, and then used that code to add a new IsValidUrl column to the Users table (and yes, this is inspired by a real-life client example, hahaha): CREATE OR ALTER FUNCTION dbo.IsValidUrl (@Url NVARCHAR(MAX)) RETURNS BIT AS BEGIN DECLARE @Result BIT = 0 -- Regex pattern for a v ..read more

Stack Overflow publishes a data dump with all user-contributed content, and it’s a fun set of data to use for demos. I took the 2024-April data dump, and imported it into a Microsoft SQL Server database. It’s an 31GB torrent (magnet) that expands to a ~202GB database. I used Microsoft SQL Server 2016, so you can attach this to anything 2016 or newer. If that’s too big, no worries – for smaller versions and past versions, check out my How to Download the Stack Overflow Database page. Some quick facts about this latest version: Badges: 51,289,973 rows; 4.7GB Comments: 90,380,323 rows; 26.1GB Po ..read more

I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento while in front of the National Gallery for Foreign Art in Sofia.   Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 03:12 MyTeaGotCold: If all of my columns are nvarchar, is there a performance benefit to always wrapping strings in N”? My tests have been inconclusive. 03:50 SadButTrue: Hey Brent, most of our Azure SQL DBs have top wait stats related to parallelism (CX***) and performance is not great. As we cannot modify the cost threshold for parallelism in Azure SQL, what other techniques can we use to reduce the waits as ..read more

Update July 11 – we’ve got the first 100 free users, and registration is closed for now. We’ll announce when we’re ready to reopen for more free folks. You already use sp_Blitz and the rest of the free, open source First Responder Kit to give your SQL Servers a health check now and then. But let’s be honest: you don’t do it often enough. You wish you had an easier way to know when your backups stop working, when corruption strikes, when a poison wait is detected, or when a new SQL Server patch comes out for one of your servers. Good news! We’ve now got a free version of SQL ConstantCare®! SQL ..read more

For T-SQL Tuesday this month, Louis Davidson suggested we give our past self some advice. I’d tell myself, “Use ‘we’, not ‘you’.” For years, when I gave advice, I’d say things like: “You’re doing A, when you should really be doing B instead.” “Your code has a problem right here.” “Your network settings are wrong, and you should change them to this instead.” The very word ‘you’ sets up a confrontational tone that puts the recipient on the defensive. They can’t help but react by taking things personally. We’re just humans, meatbags of emotion. Instead, use words like ‘we’ and ‘our’ that group ..read more