The Bit Bucket

SSMS keeps a list of the server names that you have connected to, and prompts you with those when you drop-down the list while making a connection:

Eventually, that list can either become messy, it can include servers that don’t exist anymore, and so on. You might want to clear up the list.

To do this in early versions of SSMS, you needed to locate the SqlStudio.bin file from the Documents and Settings area in your user profile. Fortunately, that’s no longer required. In more recent versions, all you needed to do was to open this dialog, arrow down to the ones that you want to remove, and hit the Delete key.

2025-09-16

This is the fourth tale in a series of stories about data. I hope you enjoy the series.

As very few people seem to have worked with SQLCMD mode, I thought I’d start this article with a little background.

Some background

Way back in SQL Server 2005, Microsoft added SQLCMD as a new command line tool to replace OSQL. It was an OLE-DB based tool rather than an ODBC based tool and had a richer set of options. For example, you could execute operating system commands within your scripts.

2025-09-15

In SSMS, when you click New Query, a new query window is opened, but because it’s blank, what might not be immediately obvious is that it’s based on a template.

The location of the template depends upon the version, but for SSMS 17.6, you’ll find it in this folder:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 21\Release\Common7\IDE\NewFileItems\SQLFile.sql

The file is called SQLFile.sql. If it’s not in the location above, just search for SQLFile.sql.

2025-09-14

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Development Level: Medium

Question:

You use a tool that does static code analysis of your T-SQL code.

It identifies the following predicate as an issue:

WHERE EXISTS 
(
    SELECT * 
    FROM dbo.Products AS p 
    WHERE p.ProductID = c.ProductID
)

Is this an issue?

2025-09-13

SQL Server execution plans can become quite large. That makes them hard to navigate because you are endlessly scrolling around the results pane in SSMS.

The pane does have some zoom features. Note that if I right-click in the whitespace, I get these options:

So I can zoom in and out, set a custom zoom level, or zoom until the entire plan fits. Generally though, that would make the plan too small to read, as soon as you have a complicated plan.

2025-09-12

I had the pleasure of recording a new PG Down Under podcast this morning. My guest was James Blackwood-Sewell.

James loves Postgres, Rust, and Kubernetes, and he says, in that order.

He spends his time chasing his children around New Zealand, working on making search transactional at ParadeDB, and talking about PGRX (a Rust based framework for writing Postgres extensions).

This show

In this show, we start by discussing Rust and why it’s become a hot topic amongst developers. In particular, it has strengths around writing reliable code because of its memory management, and its compile-time checking.

2025-09-11

In an earlier post, I described how query plans could be saved as .sqlplan file, shared, and loaded again in SSMS. It’s also possible to extract them out of SQL Server Profiler or Extended Events Profiler.

This is useful, but the same applies to deadlock graphs. SQL Server 2005 added Deadlock graph as a type of event in SQL Server Profiler. (It’s also part of Extended Events Profiler).

If I open a new trace in Profiler, I can add Deadlock graph to the list of events:

2025-09-10

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Development Level: Medium

Question:

A DBA at your site tells you that you need to make sure your predicates are sargable.

What is SARGability?

Assume a table has a column called OrderDate and it is of date data type. There is a single column index on the column. Can you give an example of a non-sargable predicate that uses it?

2025-09-09

SQL Server query plans are stored as XML. You can see what they look like by right-clicking in any query plan in SSMS, and clicking Show Execution Plan XML:

That will return a whole bunch of XML like this:

It’s important to understand that when SSMS is showing a graphical execution plan, it’s just graphically rendering some XML like the plan above.

The Properties window in SSMS is also showing details extracted from that same XML.

2025-09-08

This is the third tale in a series of stories about data. I hope you enjoy the series.

Anyone who has worked with SQL Server for any length of time knows the common errors that happen. Before a new user even completes their question, you often know how it’s going to end.

One of those questions is always about database log files that keep growing and growing until they fill all available disk space. Sound familiar? We’ve all heard about that one and most of us would have a straightforward checklist for what to look for.

2025-09-07