https://youtu.be/3foXJfWlgoM?si=54EFotE3S_oaAcxV I’ve had this mulling in my head for years and it’s not about you, I promise, and I’m just as guilty of needing to shut up once in a while. tl/dr: You wind up looking smarter when you listen and try to understand what you don’t instead of jumping ahead, interrupting the speaker and…… Continue reading Shut up (Donny) and listen
Donny was a good bowler
This probably won’t turn out to be one of my better ideas but I’m sharing my dad’s eulogy here on my blog. A tech blog. My Dad died on August 14th, 2023, about a year and a half after a diagnosis of lung cancer (never smoked a day in his life). He died in his…… Continue reading Donny was a good bowler
Send HTML Mail the Easy Way
In the name of all that is sweet and holy, stop sending yourself ugly badly-formatted tabular data in text mode. Instead, give this procedure a try and make your Database Mail messages beautiful. SQLTableToHTMLTable will generate the HTML for you without a ton of effort so that a table looks like a table in your…… Continue reading Send HTML Mail the Easy Way
The Query Store, right here waiting for you
I’ve been aware of the Query Store since it was first introduced in SQL Server 2016 and I’ve had it enabled since, but honestly, I didn’t appreciate the power of this thing until a few years ago. I’ve since learned, the Query Store can be a lot more than a passive black box, it should…… Continue reading The Query Store, right here waiting for you
What’s running right now?
sp_activespids will tell you There’s a lot of ways to see what requests are running on a MS SQL instance. For years I’ve trusted this handy custom stored procedure, sp_activespids, to get it done quickly and with little overhead. It’s been around in one form or another for almost 20 years. I’ve made most of…… Continue reading What’s running right now?