Voice of the DBA

  • T-SQL Tuesday #201: Temp Tables

    This month we have a new host, which I am grateful for. So many people have stopped blogging that it’s a challenge to keep this going. Jeff Taylor has an invite asking us about a core T-SQL topic that can affect the performance of your app and your server: temp tables. This is an interesting one for me, as I’ve changed my mind on these over the years, especially as Microsoft has made improvements to the SQL…


  • Imagine the Physical World

    Brent Ozar has a series of database animations posts, where he tries to explain what work is done by SQL Server during certain operations, such as Index Seeks and Page Splits. These show how the engine might need to read or update various pages as it tries to perform operations. Both experienced and novice SQL Server people might think that these are interesting, but not that useful. I think they’re great. For most of my IT career,…


  • Don’t Fight with AI

    I was recently trying to handle a simple task with a few AI tools to see how well things worked. I realized that AI isn’t great for everything and there are times you need your judgment to stop fighting AI and use other tools. Tl;dr choose the shortest path and know your tools. In this case, just copy paste a script and results (see the bottom). This is part of a series of experiments with AI systems.…


  • Architecting Zero Downtime Deployment Resources–Albany Day of Data

    Thanks to those who attended my session at Day of Data Albany 2026. I’m posting this to help you find the resources from the talk. Slides: ArchitectZeroDowntime_SQLSatAlbany2026 GitHub Repo: https://github.com/way0utwest/ZeroDowntime The GitHub repo has the code for the database setup and demos (and teardown) in the SQL folder. This creates the db, login/user, schema, and data. The VS project is in the DBClient folder. I don’t think this is updated beyond .Net 4.6 (?), but feel free…


  • The Quiet Part

    Apparently, Meta did what a lot of employees suspect their management will do: use AI to lay off people. In this case, there is a report (and lawsuit) that Meta used it’s AI-integrated HR platform to make decisions about who to let go in a layoff. The rumor is that the AI used productivity metrics to choose who was the target of the layoff. As with a lot of AI failures, this appears to be another case…


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