Month: June 2026

Another crazy week

(Warning: This blog post is non-technical but purely personal. In my leukemia diary, I write openly about my current health issues. This blog might be triggering for people who struggle with, or lost dear ones to, cancer and other similar diseases.) It’s exactly a month after my last leukemia diary entry. Not much happened for most of that time. And then a lot happened. May 18 until June 3 Yes, I know that this entry starts even before my last diary entry, which was May 19. Deal with it. During this period, originally planned for two weeks, but then extended…

Storage structures 5 – XML indexes

After covering on-disk rowstore, columnstore indexes, memory-optimized storage, and memory-optimized columnstores, it is now time to turn our attention to storage structures that are used for specific datatypes only. The first “victim” will be the XML index. When you need to store XML data in a SQL Server database, you can choose between two data types, each with their pros and cons. You can choose to store the XML data as nvarchar(max). This preserves the exact content of the XML as you received it, which might be required for legal reasons. However, any query that cares about the specific content…

Video training update 2026

During the past months, in between working on new videos, I have also made various updates to existing videos in the SQLServerFast Execution Plan Video Training. Since I pushed two really big updates (over half an hour of added content!) live today, I decided that now is a good time to let everyone know what I changed. But let’s first address a few questions you might have. Questions and answers How does this affect the prices? Many of the changes are small, as you will see in the overview below. However, two videos have been extended with a significant amount…

Optional Parameter Plan Optimization

It’s time to finish the triptych on bad parameter sniffing, and how Microsoft tries (and fails) to fix this for you. After first talking about bad parameter sniffing in general, I used my last video to explain Parameter Sensitive Plan Optimization, the feature that Microsoft released in SQL Server 2022 as an attempt to fix one of the three root causes for bad parameter sniffing. If you want to see why I consider that a failed attempt, go watch that video. In SQL Server 2025, Microsoft then added Optional Parameter Plan Optimization (OPPO). Their attempt to fix the second of…

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