A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Kellyn Gorman continues a series on PostgreSQL for the Oracle DBA:
As discussed in an earlier blog post, Oracle groups wait events into wait classes like User I/O, System I/O, Concurrency, Network, Idle, Commit, and more. By grouping wait events into categories, it helps the technologist identify where time is being spent in the database, (DB Time) and as there is often a correlation between waits, identify culprits.
Read on to see how the two systems compare.
Leave a CommentBrent Ozar looks under the covers:
When CTP 2.0 came out, I blogged the thousands of new feature flags, messages, and system objects in SQL Server 2025 CTP 2.0, and I haven’t had the time to dig more deeply into those yet. In that post, I discussed the new sys.dm_feature_switches table, and I mentioned that it might disappear before release. Indeed it has – last week’s new CTP 2.1 removed access to that table, meaning that was probably our one-time shot to get a glimpse into something cool and undocumented. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when folks at Microsoft read my blog post and realized they’d left that table unguarded and publicly visible, hahaha. I love my job.
So now CTP 2.1 is out, and it comes with a few things I think you’re going to be interested in.
Read on to see what Brent has found.
Leave a CommentJohn Kerski has a baker’s dozen:
When I first started with Power Query, it was in Excel, through the Power Pivot feature. I was amazed at how I could transform data with just a few clicks and quickly create PivotTables. Then, when Power Query appeared in Power BI, I began working with larger data sources and more complex projects.
Through many trials and tribulations, I learned the capabilities of Power Query and the M language (the functional language that actually transforms our data), as well as its idiosyncrasies. Unsurprisingly, with Power BI adoption and rapid growth, many newcomers are learning the same lessons I did.
Read on for some of John’s early pain points. By the way, regarding John’s banker’s rounding note, that’s the norm for .NET, though not for Excel or SQL. It’s also more accurate in the aggregate than “to the 5’s” rounding, though it can be confusing to people who aren’t expecting it.
Leave a CommentDavid Fitzjarrell is looking for a speedup:
There may be times when the DBA wants, or needs, to know:
- What indexes are created against a given table
- How those indexes are built
Such information is critical to performance tuning or discovering why, when an index exists, it isn’t used. Let’s dig into this and see what we find.
Click through for some sample queries.
Leave a CommentMost teams building production applications understand that “uptime” matters. I am writing this blog to demonstrate how much difference an extra 0.09% makes.
At 99.9% availability, your system can be down for over 43 minutes every month. At 99.99%, that window drops to just over 4 minutes. If your product is critical to business operations, customer workflows, or revenue generation, those 39 extra minutes of downtime each month can be the difference between trust and churn.
Click through for some of the tools and practices that can help get you there in PostgreSQL.
Leave a CommentBoniface Muchendu does a bit of comparison:
Power BI variance measures are essential for delivering actionable insights through dynamic comparisons like month-over-month (MoM) and year-over-year (YoY) performance. This guide shows how to build flexible, filter-aware DAX measures and apply them within clean, user-friendly visuals to enhance your reports.
Click through to see them in action.
Leave a CommentEitan Blumin shares some recommendations:
In many SQL Server environments, DBAs configure SQL Agent jobs with retry attempts (which is a smart move to handle transient issues gracefully). But with it comes a hidden pitfall that often goes unnoticed:
Retry-enabled job steps can silently overwrite logs or cause runaway log growth, depending on how the output file is configured.
The culprit? Improper use of append settings and missing time-based tokens in output file paths.
Read on to learn more.
Leave a CommentAdam Bertram runs out of time:
Have you ever had a Pester test hang indefinitely, blocking your entire test suite? Maybe it’s waiting for a network response that never comes, or stuck in an infinite loop. Without proper timeout handling, one bad test can ruin your entire CI/CD pipeline.
In this article, you’ll learn how to implement robust timeout handling for Pester tests using PowerShell runspaces, ensuring your test suite always completes in a predictable timeframe.
Click through for the code and explanation.
Leave a CommentIt’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your Kevin Wilkie is?:
In our last few posts, we’ve looked at how to:
Today, we’re diving into a different, but equally powerful question:
When are my Snowflake warehouses actually running?
Click through for the query and an example of it in action.
Leave a CommentTom Collins has troubleshooting tip for us:
Receiving a regular ” There is insufficient system memory in resource pool ‘default’ to run this query” message in the SQL Server Error logs, leading to unavailability of sufficien resources to connect.
This query supplied by Jonathan Kehayias is a great way to start assessing if there is SQL Server memory presure .
Click through for the query and some additional explanation.
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