Just after I was born, my mother and father called me Gregory. Ever since then, everyone has called me Greg. And that included my parents. To the day she died, my mother called me Greg and so did my dad while he was alive (miss you both).
I have friends who tell me that the only time their mothers used their full names was when they were in trouble for some reason.
2026-07-17
I’ve pointed out in previous blog posts that I’m not a fan of ORMs. What I’m even less of a fan of is code-first design, particularly in combination with an ORM like the Entity Framework.
It might seem cool and shiny and if you are just whipping up a small proof of concept or test app, please feel free to do it, but the minute you think of doing it for enterprise systems, please just don’t. And if you have colleagues wanting to do this, just say no.
2026-07-15
I work with data. I understand that for most organizations, that the data they own is the most valuable asset the company owns.
One thing I’ve learned from working with data is that unlike application software, data generally outlives generations of applications, is often used by many different applications, and typically just morphs from shape to shape over time. It almost never gets totally refreshed.
This is a good thing.
2026-07-09
Memory is a precious resource on most systems today. SQL Server loves memory, so it’s important to avoid wasting it.
One common cause of wasted memory is what we call plan cache pollution. The plan cache is the region where SQL Server stores compiled query plans (and query plan stubs).
There are some nice new DMVs that give you details of what’s in that cache but nothing still compares to one of the older compatibility views sys.syscacheobjects. You can use it to see what’s in your plan cache:
2026-07-07
I spend most of my life in a variety of customer sites. Most of these nowadays tend to be large financial organizations. When I talk to developers in those organizations, and ask them about how they interact with their DBAs, I can’t tell you how often I hear that they try to avoid ever making schema changes, etc. as it takes too long and the process is painful.
When I talk to the DBAs at the same organizations, and I ask them why they resist making schema changes, I hear this:
2026-07-05
Day by day, we’re getting further away from needing to use 32-bit DLLs. One place where I keep coming across them, is when doing integration work. The problem is that there are many 32-bit drivers for older systems, and no-one is going to ever bother to write 64-bit drivers for them. So, if you have to use those drivers, you need to run the 32-bit versions. And SSIS has options that allow you to run 32-bit drivers.
2026-06-29
Two of the parameters in SQL Server connections are the Application Name and the Host Name. You can see these in SQL Server if you execute the following command:
SELECT HOST_NAME() AS HostName, APP_NAME() AS ApplicationName;
On my system, that returns:
I’ve always been a fan of having applications identify themselves in their connection strings. It makes tasks like tracing much easier. The tools supplied with SQL Server do a reasonable job of that as you can see above. But many other tools don’t do such a good job.
2026-06-27
One of the common challenges that arises in many applications is around how to optimize the SQL Server performance of dynamic search queries. For example, we’ve all seen applications with screens like this:
Often, there will be many, many more fields to be searched.
What I often hear from developers is that there is no way to optimize the query because you don’t know in advance which options the user will choose. While this is partly true, it assumes that human behaviour is much more random than it really is.
2026-06-25
For general index maintenance, our friend Old Hallengren has an awesome solution for most people: https://ola.hallengren.com/sql-server-index-and-statistics-maintenance.html
We started to have customers using clustered columnstore indexes from SQL Server 2014, and they needed to be treated differently. At the time, I checked Ola’s latest scripts to see what happens with columnstore indexes.
It appeared that the code ignored nonclustered columnstore indexes (ie: index type of 6), which made sense as we would potentially need to rebuild them whenever the data changes, and at the time, the table was read-only. So that made lots of sense. Fortunately, that limitation is now gone.
2026-06-21
When I attend events like TechEd/Build/Ignite, like many people I usually find the networking time more valuable than the session time. There is a pretty tight limit on the number of sessions you can attend, no matter how hard you try. So I often watch the sessions later when I can.
At one of the earliest TechEd Australia events that I attended, they gave us DVDs of the TechEd USA sessions. That was great because that TechEd had around 250 sessions, and there were over 150 that I would have loved to attend. Clearly that wasn’t possible.
2026-06-19