You’d love to have a job tuning SQL Servers, but you don’t have an environment to practice in. Here’s how to teach yourself performance tuning and prepare yourself to land and succeed in job interviews.
You finally got approval to move to new hardware and a fresher version of SQL Server. After months of work, you do the migration and then… performance gets worse. What can cause this, and what do you look for?
SQL Server’s “index usage stats” dynamic management view is incredibly useful– but does it tell you what you THINK it tells you?
I explain the quirks of how sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats works and why the information is so valuable.
Recently I got a fun question about an “upsert” pattern as a “Dear SQL DBA” question. The question is about TSQL, so it lent itself to being answered in a blog post where I can show repro code and screenshots.
Learn why SQL Server’s table partitioning feature doesn’t make your queries faster– and may even make them slower.
I’ve been asked a lot of questions about updating statistics in SQL Server over the years. And I’ve asked a lot of questions myself! Here’s a rundown of all the practical questions that I tend to get about how to maintain these in SQL Server.
Whenever you’ve got a new feature, one of the first things to ask is, “What happens when I break it?”
Because we’re going to break stuff.
Copyright (c) 2025, Catalyze SQL, LLC; all rights reserved. Opinions expressed on this site are solely those of Kendra Little of Catalyze SQL, LLC. Content policy: Short excerpts of blog posts (3 sentences) may be republished, but longer excerpts and artwork cannot be shared without explicit permission.