SQL Server Radio

We let a dice roll decide today's topic, and the winner ended up being: Computed Columns with PERSISTED and Indexed Expressions. We give our thoughts about it, best practices, pit falls, and tips. Relevant links: SQL Server 2025 Preview RC1: Now Supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10 | Microsoft Community Hub Specify computed columns in a table - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn Indexes on computed columns - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn

10/13/25 • 37:55

Guy and Eitan discuss several interesting announcements and updates from Microsoft related to SQL Server and VS Code. And also Eitan talks about a weird issue he encountered involving page latch time-outs during DBCC CHECK command. Please fill out the SQL Server on Linux adoption survey here! Thank you! Relevant links: Higher log rate for business critical service tier in Azure SQL MI | Microsoft Community Hub What's New in MSSQL Extension for VS Code v1.35 Accelerating SQL Server 2025 momentum: Announcing the first release candidate - Microsoft SQL Server Blog Error 845 Time-out occurred while waiting for buffer latch type 4 during DBCC CHECK - Eitan Blumin's blog

9/8/25 • 34:40

Guy and Eitan discuss security-related best practice scripts, and several interesting AI topics. Relevant links: microsoft-dbas-club/Security and Compliance/Check_Passwords_SQL_Server_Generated.sql microsoft-dbas-club/Security and Compliance/Best Practice Checks/Invalid_owner_for_system_schema_role_or_database.sql microsoft-dbas-club/Security and Compliance/Windows Group Members.sql Microsoft Introduced AI Integrations for SQL Server. - Brent Ozar Unlimited® What's New in MSSQL Extension for VS Code v1.34 AI coding platform goes rogue during code freeze and deletes entire company database EitanBlumin/sqlcmd-gui: a simple graphical user interface based on SQLCMD for executing parameterized TSQL scripts 

8/11/25 • 36:50

Guy and Eitan discuss Stephen Planck's blog post "Five SQL Server 2025 Enhancements DBAs Will Notice", and add some of their own insights. Relevant links: Five SQL Server 2025 Enhancements DBAs Will Notice - SQL Table Talk Configure a flexible automatic failover policy for an availability group - SQL Server Always On | Microsoft Learn Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR) in TempDB | Microsoft Learn Enable and Run tempdb on tmpfs for SQL Server 2025 Preview on Linux - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn Optimized Locking - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn Standard Developer edition in SQL Server 2025 | Microsoft Learn ABORT_QUERY_EXECUTION query hint - public preview | Microsoft Community Hub  

7/7/25 • 29:18

Many announcements and interesting releases came out this past month, so we got a lot to talk about in this episode! Relevant links: What's New in SQL Server 2025 - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn SQL Server 2025 - AI ready enterprise database from ground to cloud | Microsoft Community Hub Announcing Public Preview of DiskANN in SQL Server 2025 | Microsoft Community Hub SQL Server 2025: introducing optimized Halloween protection | Microsoft Community Hub SQL Server 2025: introducing tempdb space resource governance | Microsoft Community Hub Unlocking the Power of Regex in SQL Server - Azure SQL Devs' Corner Announcing the General Availability (GA) of JSON data type and JSON aggregates | Microsoft Community Hub Announcing the Public Preview of JSON index in SQL Server 2025 | Microsoft Community Hub ZSTD compression in SQL Server 2025 | Microsoft Community Hub MSSQL Extension for VS Code: GitHub Copilot Preview + UI GA MSSQL Extension for VS Code: Introducing Schema Compare (Preview) - Azure SQL Devs' Corner SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 21 is now generally available (GA) | Microsoft Community Hub Copilot in SSMS preview Recently released: Updates to the SqlPackage and the DacFx ecosystem | Microsoft Community Hub Visual Studio 2022 Release Notes | Microsoft Learn Free SQL Managed Instance offer is now generally available Avoid T-SQL anti-patterns with the free T-SQL analysis tool - Azure SQL Devs' Corner

6/9/25 • 38:14

Guy talks about a recent migration project he was working on to move an on-prem SQL Server to AWS RDS. Eitan talks about a new AI-related feature in Azure SQL Databases. And we also discuss the new SNAPSHOT backup T-SQL command in SQL Server 2022. Relevant links: Importing and exporting SQL Server databases using native backup and restore - Amazon Relational Database Service Learn about Amazon RDS maintenance window | AWS re:Post LLM Structured Output from Azure SQL Explained - Azure SQL Devs' Corner Create a Transact-SQL snapshot backup - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn

5/12/25 • 38:59

Guy and Eitan worry about the decline in SQL Server feature quality. But maybe there's something else behind it? Relevant links: Improving Azure SQL Database reliability with accelerated database recovery in tempdb | Microsoft Community Hub What the Decline of Sql Server Quality means for Developers and DBAs SLA for SQL Database | Azure AI will eliminate DBA Jobs faster than you think

4/14/25 • 32:37

Guy and Eitan discuss a few interesting topics. Including a fun new game called "SQL Noir", how to implement statistical clustering model in SQL, about surrogate and natural keys, and the recently announced deprecation of Azure Data Studio. Relevant links: SQL Noir - A Detective SQL Game How to Write a Recursive CTE in SQL Server | LearnSQL.com Azure Data Studio Retirement - Azure SQL Devs' Corner Relational Databases - Surrogate Keys and Logical Duplicates (by Ami Levin)

3/10/25 • 34:36

Guy and Eitan answer an interesting question from the forum regarding the logic of NOT BETWEEN. And also, checking out the SQL Squid Game, discussing SQL Audit, and sharing some tips for SSMS. Relevant links: SQL Squid Game SQL Server Audit (Database Engine) - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn microsoft-dbas-club/Maintenance/SQLVersionUpdates Tell us how you did and whether you survived the SQL Squid Game! 😉

2/10/25 • 31:25

Guy and Eitan talk about SQL Server 2025 (well, they try to, at least), and its various interesting upcoming features. Relevant links: Announcing SQL Server 2025 – SQLServerCentral What's New in SQL Server 2025 - Brent Ozar Unlimited® Optimized Locking - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn SQLBits is Coming Back to London in June 2025! - Brent Ozar Unlimited®

1/13/25 • 32:08

Guy and Eitan go over the most popular sessions released from the SQL PASS archive of 2023, and discuss some other topics. Relevant links: Announcing Microsoft SQL Server 2025: Enterprise AI-ready database from ground to cloud - Microsoft SQL Server Blog Sessions Archive for 2023 - PASS Data Community Summit Resolving and Preventing Deadlocks in SQL Server SSMS v21: Dark Mode, Git, Vertical Tabs, and More - Brent Ozar Unlimited® Copilot in SSMS is Kinda Like IE in SSMS - Brent Ozar Unlimited®

12/9/24 • 34:10

Guy and Eitan discuss the common challenge of long-running database integrity checks (DBCC CHECKDB) and a solution to resolve it, and why do we need integrity checks at all? Relevant links: PASS Data Community Summit Incremental Integrity Check for Large Databases - Eitan Blumin's blog SQL Server Integrity Check - by Ola Hallengren tigertoolbox/MaintenanceSolution/5_job_Maintenance.sql · microsoft/tigertoolbox sp_can_tlog_be_applied (Transact-SQL) - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn T-SQL Script to Roll Forward Transaction Log Backups - Eitan Blumin's blog

11/11/24 • 32:36

Guy and Eitan discuss some interesting news from Microsoft regarding SQL Server, and also about the right way to handle index fragmentation. Relevant links: Resources from Microsoft: Preview release of SDK-style SQL projects in Visual Studio 2022 - Microsoft Community Hub Native JSON support now in preview in Azure SQL Managed Instance - Microsoft Community Hub EAP for Vector Support Refresh - Introducing Vector type - Azure SQL Devs' Corner (microsoft.com) Calling external REST endpoints from Azure SQL Database | Microsoft Learn Index fragmentation: SQL Server Backup, Integrity Check, Index and Statistics Maintenance (hallengren.com) Should we do index maintenance on an Azure SQL Managed Instance or Azure SQL Database? (kendralittle.com) Stop Worrying About SQL Server Index Fragmentation (brentozar.com) Why SQL Server Index Fragmentation Isn't A Problem On Modern Storage Hardware – Darling Data (erikdarling.com) Index fragmentation scripts: microsoft-dbas-club/Indexes/Table and Index High Unused Space.sql at MadeiraData/microsoft-dbas-club Check Index Fragmentation Based on Page Fullness and Fill Factor Upcoming webinar at the Cloud Data Driven Meetup: Database DevOps for Leaders - Eitan Blumin, Thu, Oct 24, 2024, 12:00 PM | Meetup

10/14/24 • 32:49

Fair warning for all listeners! Before starting to listen to this podcast, very strongly recommended: Have the diagram at the bottom of this page ready in front of you, so that it'll be easier for you to follow along: Common Causes and Troubleshooting Solutions for SQL AG Data Synchronization Latency - Microsoft Community Hub (sorry in advance!) Additional relevant links: Index cleanup : Harder than it looks - Simple Talk (red-gate.com) Find Overlapping Indexes.sql at chadbaldwin/SQL (github.com)

9/9/24 • 37:40

Guy and Eitan discuss the recent CrowdStrike incident and what it would mean for DBAs, and discuss options to load huge CSV files into SQL Server as fast as possible. Relevant links: 101 of Troubleshooting SQL Server on Linux - Microsoft Community Hub bcp utility - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn Altering lock escalation for SQL Server tables (mssqltips.com) dbatools docs | Import-DbaCsv A Fast Way to Load Large CSV Files into Microsoft SQL Server | by Sasha Korovkina

8/12/24 • 35:32

Guy and Eitan discuss some important and interesting news from Microsoft about SQL Server, Straight Path Solutions publish 30 articles about SQL Server security checks, Guy talks about his experience with Excel, and Eitan is irritated about people still not doing SQL jobs correctly in AlwaysOn Availability Groups. Relevant links: SQLBits Free Videos - YouTube JSON data type (preview) - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn Efficient Time-Based Audit Log Filtering for Azure SQL Database - Microsoft Community Hub UNISTR and ANSI SQL concatenation operator (||) (microsoft.com) SQL Server on Azure VMs: I/O analysis (preview) - Microsoft Community Hub Announcing the retirement of SQL Server Stretch Database - Microsoft SQL Server Blog 30 SQL Server Security Checks in 30 Days Archives - Straight Path Solutions Use Sparse Columns - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn SQL Server Jobs & AlwaysOn Interoperability | HADRMyJobs

7/8/24 • 38:44

Guy and Eitan continue discussing HADR solutions. But this time focusing on Transactional Replication, its cons and pros and potential use cases. Also, some important announcements from Microsoft about Azure SQL! Relevant links: Data API builder General Availability (microsoft.com) Build REST API with Azure Data API Builder (DAB) (mssqltips.com) Zero ETL, Near-real time replication, Mirroring Azure SQL Databases in Fabric (microsoft.com) Announcing EAP for Vector Support in Azure SQL Database - Azure SQL Devs' Corner (microsoft.com) Update Policy for Azure SQL Managed Instance - Microsoft Community Hub Transactional Replication - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn MadeiraData/ReplicationManagementMechanism: Use SQL Server database tables to manage and configure Transactional Replication, and set it up easily between publishers and subscribers using stored procedures (github.com)

6/10/24 • 35:32

Guy and Eitan discuss the various High Availability and Disaster Recovery options available to us in Microsoft SQL Server, their main advantages, limitations, and when it's most suitable to use or not to use them. Relevant links for further reading: AlwaysOn Basic Availability Groups / Database Mirroring AlwaysOn "Enterprize" Availability Groups Failover Cluster Instance Log Shipping Transactional Replication

5/13/24 • 34:37

Guy and Eitan talk about some interesting news from Microsoft about SQL Server in Azure. And also discuss the topic of Backups and Recovery, RTO, RPO, RCO, and database Integrity Checks. Relevant links: Microsoft Copilot in Azure extends capabilities to Azure SQL Database (Private Preview) - Microsoft Community Hub Regex in SQL DB (microsoft.com) SQL Server Regular Expressions Library Sample - Microsoft Community Hub STRING_SPLIT (Transact-SQL) - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn Do You Have a Proper Backup Strategy? (madeiradata.com) CHECKDB From Every Angle: Consistency Checking Options for a VLDB - Paul S. Randal (sqlskills.com) Where to Run DBCC on Always On Availability Groups - Brent Ozar Unlimited®   Also, check out our previous episode, if you haven't yet: SQL Server Radio: Episode 161 - EXCLUSIVE: Announcing the Biggest Innovation for Azure SQL Managed Instances (Codename: Hermes)

4/8/24 • 35:55

Niko Neugebauer and Vladimir Ivanovic are our esteemed guests for today, and they have a HUGE announcement to make about Azure SQL Managed Instances. Extra! Extra! 🗞 Hear all about it on this exclusive scoop here at the SQL Server Radio podcast! Relevant links: Azure SQL Managed Instance Next-gen GP (microsoft.com) Use Next-gen General Purpose service tier - Azure SQL Managed Instance | Microsoft Learn Try for free (preview) - Azure SQL Managed Instance | Microsoft Learn Next-gen General Purpose service tier brings 500 user dbs, improved storage and more to Azure #SQLMI (youtube.com) (2 min video)

3/21/24 • 41:51

Guy tries to convince Eitan that OPTION(RECOMPILE) is the ultimate "Turbo" button in SQL Server, and that it's strongly underappreciated. Relevant links for more info: OPTION(RECOMPILE) (Transact-SQL) - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn Recompile a Stored Procedure - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn Should I use option(recompile)? – SQLServerCentral SQL SERVER - Parameter Sniffing and OPTION (RECOMPILE) - SQL Authority with Pinal Dave

2/12/24 • 32:49

Guy and Eitan discuss various practices in SQL Server that hurt performance and possibly waste money, negative VarDecimal numbers, renumbering Identity columns, and the new Azure Database Fleet Manager. Relevant links: SQL Server IN Clause With Multiple Literal Values Performance Behaviour | Neeraj Prasad Sharma Could SQL Injection be dangerous even when perfectly safe? | Eitan Blumin The Anatomy of Vardecimals | Mark S. Rasmussen Utility Scripts/ReNumber_Identity_Column.sql Introducing Azure Database Fleet Manager Also, Happy New Year! 🎉🎈🥂

1/8/24 • 37:55

Guy and Eitan talk about some great things about SQL Server, and mostly Guy's experience in digging into execution plans and generating synthetic IO workloads. Relevant links: What's new in SQL Server and Azure SQL 2023 Year in Review Multi-Tenancy in the Real World | Eitan Blumin (Data Weekender 6.5)  

12/11/23 • 41:41

Guy and Eitan go back to their SQL Server roots and go hardcore into execution plan analysis and database corruption. Relevant links: Health Check Scripts/Find_Top_Exec_Plans_to_Optimize.sql SQLServerFast.com Database Corruption Challenge by Steve Steadman A DBA's Guide to the Proper Handling of Corruption Data TLV Summit PASS Data Community Summit  

10/9/23 • 39:00

Guy and Eitan celebrate resuming the school year with some learning of their own. This time, focusing on encryption types in SQL Server. Relevant links: External REST Endpoint Invocation is now GA! Types of Encryption in SQL Server PWDENCRYPT and PWDCOMPARE Dynamic Data Masking And also, don't forget to register for the upcoming Data TLV Summit!

9/11/23 • 39:42

Today we have Kevin Chant as our guest! We talk about Kevin's favorite topics: Microsoft Fabric, Azure DevOps, SQL Server, and more. Relevant links: https://www.kevinrchant.com/2023/06/13/create-your-own-microsoft-fabric-environment/  

8/14/23 • 33:24

Guy and Eitan discuss several interesting topics and recent experiences that you'd want to hear about! Relevant links: Trigram Wildcard String Search in SQL Server The Story of DBeaver, PostgreSQL, and the silly data engineer SQL Server Error Log Management High VLF Counts Got You Down? Here's How to Keep Them Low and Performance High

7/10/23 • 37:14

As promised in the previous episode, Guy and Eitan interview an actual human this time! The one and only, the famed Erik Darling is our guest for today! Check out his official website: Erik Darling Data Erik Darling's YouTube Channel We apologize in advance for Guy's occasional audio glitches, as he was having network issues on the day of recording.

6/12/23 • 39:04

Guy and Eitan try something new for today's show - we interview ChatGPT as our guest for today, and make it pretend that it's a SQL Server expert! Let's see how it does. Relevant links: Monitor performance by using the Query Store Brent Ozar Unlimited SQLSkills Scary DBA SQL Authority PASS Data Community Summit SQLBits GroupBy Virtual Conference Data Platform Summit

5/8/23 • 37:01

Guy and Eitan share their experience from SQLBits 2023 and some of their favorite sessions. Relevant links: Official SQLBits Website SQLBits Content Library SQLBits YouTube Channel SQL Server Debugging with WinDbg – an Introduction Join #TeamHugo and Help Fight Leukemia Parameter Sensitive Plan optimization Azure Functions overview GitHub CoPilot  

4/10/23 • 31:57