Joins are essential. The SQL Corgs introduce you to INNER joins in this animated short.

Why do we “normalize” relational databases, and what are the basics? Awkward Unicorn explains, with a little help from their friends.

Freyja the corgi shares her tips for learning SQL: SELECT, FROM, and WHERE.

Now that I’m getting the hang of this, I think I’m going to do a whole series of shorts on SQL syntax essentials, plus tips and tricks!

I learned to make short form videos with my drawings this week, and, well… things are about to get weirder.

I’ve spent a bit of time with Microsoft’s new database watcher tool for Azure SQL recently. There are a lot of things I like about database watcher– which is currently in preview and which refuses to Capitalize Its Name– but it does one big thing that I really, really like: it collects data from Query Store. You can access that Query Store data from built-in database watcher dashboards, query it using KQL, or (something something) in Microsoft Fabric if you’ve got money to burn on your monitoring data.

I’m teaming up with Erik Darling to teach you SQL Server Performance Tuning in two days at the PASS Data Community Summit in Seattle.

Erik and I are co-teaching both days of training to give you a strong strategic background on the internals you need to know, along with critical tactical performance tuning techniques. Join us to level up your perf tuning skills!

Register Here →

I’ve got a backlog of learnings from stress-testing to blog, so if you like this post there’s more to come. I’m a huge fan of SQL Server’s Query Store feature. Query Store collects query execution plans and aggregate query performance metrics, including wait stats. Having Query Store enabled makes troubleshooting performance issues such as bad parameter sniffing, much, much easier. Because Query Store is integrated into SQL Server itself, it also can catch query plans in a lightweight way that an external monitoring system will often miss.

I’ve been an employee at small, medium, and large companies, and I’ve also been a short-term consultant working with a new company in any given week. I’ve worked with hundreds of tech companies remotely and have visited companies onsite on multiple continents.

Air-dropping into company cultures to work through problems with teams and present recommendations to their leadership reveals common anti-patterns in leadership – plus some patterns that make teams raving fans of their management.

Here’s the top 5 Toxic Flavors of Tech Execs I’ve encountered over 20 years, plus the Top 5 Team Building Tech Execs I’ve found, too.