Indexes are fantastic when you’re reading data—and a tax when you’re writing it. Every INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE has to maintain each affected index; more indexes mean longer transactions, heavier logging, bigger backups, and sometimes blocking. Cleaning up unused indexes is one of the quickest wins in a health check—if you do it safely.Don’t let unused indexes drive your SQL Server write I/O and CPU through the roof.Clean them up to keep I/O, CPU, and SQL Server under control.How SQL Server tracks “usage”sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats increments counters when the optimizer seeks, scans, or looks up rows through an index since the last SQL Server restart.…
Author: drweb
A survey of 206 IT leaders and executives finds that, with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) coding tools, more application development teams are devoting more time to reviewing rather than writing code. Conducted by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) on behalf of Perforce, the survey finds 57% of developers now spend more time on code […]
The following lists high-quality free AI/ML books. Each entry links to the official source, lists the authors, notes the free format (PDF/HTML/etc.) and whether a sign‑up is required. The books are roughly ordered from more influential and comprehensive texts to specialized or emerging topics. Deep Learning — Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville (HTML; no signup). This seminal MIT Press text provides a sweeping treatment of deep learning theory and practice, covering everything from linear algebra and probability theory to convolutional and generative models. The authors note that the online version is complete and will remain freely accessible. The book uses an HTML format…
Zero-day exploits don’t wait for anyone and are one of the main reasons why the cybersecurity market will be worth a whopping $256 billion worldwide. In the current threat landscape, attackers weaponize vulnerabilities within hours of disclosure, and that puts DevOps teams in a precarious position. The ability to patch quickly and confidently can mean […]
I hosted this month, late as it turns out, but we still had a few entries. Here’s a look at the blogs people published.First as always, Rob Farley writes about the complexity of string parsing, using TVFs. He also shows some of the performance implications of complex parsing. Thanks to Rob for reminding me to get the invite out.Louis Davidson wrote about parsing HTML, which is definitely a challenge in T-SQL given the nature of the language and how embedded different tags can be. I’ve done this a little, and I prefer using Python to do this Courtney Woolum writes…
Have disappointing slowdowns, elusive bugs, and misleading outages ever affected your digital system, even when traditional monitoring shows “all green”? Today’s users demand spontaneous experiences, but DevOps, SRE and software teams often struggle with limited visibility in giant front-end and back-end systems. Result? Customer dissatisfaction, reduction in uptime, and lost revenue. The Good News: End-to-end […]
What if you could turn Claude from a conversational assistant into a development partner that actually does things—safely, securely, and without touching your local machine? If you’ve been exploring Claude Desktop and wondering how to connect it with real developer tools, Docker MCP Toolkit is the missing piece you’ve been looking for. Here’s the reality: Today’s AI assistants are brilliant at reasoning and explaining concepts. But when it comes to acting on that knowledge? They’re stuck. They can’t deploy containers, manage repos, or analyze data without trusted tools to bridge that gap. That’s where Docker MCP Toolkit comes in. Think…
Every DBA has faced that moment when SQL Server feels like a silent partner. You look at waits like CXPACKET, WRITELOG, or RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE, run a dozen DMVs, and hope the culprit reveals itself before your coffee gets cold. Let us learn more about SQL SERVER and AI – Setting Up an MCP Server for Natural Language Tuning.Now imagine if you could simply ask your database questions such as:“Find top queries causing high WRITELOG waits in the last hour.”and SQL Server politely answers back. That magic happens through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). With just a few steps, you can connect…
I like to subject myself to agony from time to time. So, I tried to build my SQL Server 2025 test environment in Docker from scratch. I thought I was getting behind with the good stuff about the native AI integration into the Microsoft database platform – vector search and the concept of embedding in particular. Spinning a SQL Server container in Docker is easy peasy.But setting up SQL Server to connect to the Large Language Model over a Secure Proxy is not for the faint of heart. Just the angst of getting the spaces aligned in the YAML file…
I had a customer recently reach out to ask if SQL Clone would work with 20 backup files. I decided to test this.This is part of a series of posts on SQL Clone, which is a virtualization product from Redgate Software.The ScenarioA customer asked about SQL Clone working with a lot of backup files (striped), like 20. Our support org said this should work and handle the max number of files, which is 64 for the backup command.I know SQL Clone works with striped backups because I wrote an article on it, but I only tested 7 files. How to…