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Day: November 9, 2026

DOP and Tipping Points

Published 2026-11-09 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling gets caught DOPing:

Erik Darling here with Darling Data. And I’ve got a question that I thought was interesting enough to actually answer with a brief demonstration, so I’m going to do that today. But it is about DOP and tipping points, or as I will lovingly refer to them from now on, DOPing points, because why not?

This video is more conjectural in nature and shows an interesting use of MAXDOP(1) to nudge the optimizer toward seeks rather than scans given a certain style of query.

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Thoughts on Automatic Index Compaction

Published 2026-11-09 by Kevin Feasel

Monica Morehouse asks a question:

hile attending SQLCon and FabCon Europe in Barcelona, there were a lot of announcements that caught my attention. But there was one during the SQL keynote that made my DBA ears perk up: Automatic Index Compaction is generally available. And then came the comment that really got my attention: Could this be the beginning of the end of traditional index maintenance? Wait…WHAT? For those of us who have been working with SQL Server for a long time, index maintenance has practically been part of the DBA job description. Check fragmentation. Reorganize. Rebuild. Repeat. And for far too many environments, the strategy has basically been:

It’s Sunday at 2:00 AM. Time to rebuild ALL THE THINGS!

But should we really be doing that?

Click through for her answer. Also, shout out to Greg Moore in the comments for the Betteridge’s Law of Headlines usage. Greg is clearly a classy individual full of great ideas. Jeff Moden, additionally, has a comment worth reading.

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Installing SQL Server and Creating a Cluster on a Linux VM Host

Published 2026-11-09 by Kevin Feasel

Lee Markup continues a series on building a SQL Server and Windows network on top of a Linux host:

All four VMs run on KVM/libvirt, using the SQLLab virtual network and subdomain.example.com we set up.

In this post, we will walk through an automated install of SQL Server and creating the Windows cluster needed to build an Availability Group.

Lee does not simply click next-next-next for installation.

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Reseeding a Single Database in an Availability Group

Published 2026-11-09 by Kevin Feasel

John Morehouse solves a problem:

Recently, I found myself dealing with an Availability Group (AG) where I needed to remove a single database from one secondary replica and then add it back. Nothing particularly unusual about that, right? Except I wanted to use automatic seeding to rebuild that database without affecting the other databases already synchronized on the replica. That led me down an interesting rabbit hole involving how SQL Server handles automatic seeding, what happens when you remove a secondary database from an AG, and how you can rebuild just one database without disrupting the others.

Let’s take a look!

Read on to see how you can do this without disrupting the existing databases that are in good shape.

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Choosing an Initial Fabric Capacity

Published 2026-11-09 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley drags the slider:

Picking your first Fabric capacity is basically a bet on how fast your usage will grow, and most people bet wrong in one particular direction: too big, too soon.

Match size to purpose, not ambition. An F2 or F4 is plenty for a pilot or a single developer testing pipelines and reports. A departmental rollout usually lands in the F8–F32 range, while an enterprise-wide deployment needs F64 or larger. Buying big before you know your real usage just funds idle capacity. It’s tempting to buy for the org chart you’ll have in two years, but Fabric makes scaling up trivial later, so there’s little upside in paying for headroom you’re not using yet.

Read on for some additional thoughts about what makes an F64 special and how you can save a bit of scratch.

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