Finding Out What Changed in a Cumulative Update

Over the last several years, Microsoft has been putting less and less effort into Cumulative Update documentation. We used to get full-blown knowledge base articles about fixes, but these days, we get a collection of footnotes with deceiving hyperlinks that look like they’re going to lead to more information – but they simply lead back to themselves.

The Backup Space Needed

SQL Server 2022 CU Updates and Error Code 0x851A0043

The documentation cautions that cumulative updates (CU) could fail if a specific registry key isn’t updated after moving the master files, so I wanted to test this before I spent too much time configuring the server.

Tracking Table Sizes

Today Steve asks if you track the details of your table growth inside a database.

How to rename a SQL Server database

There may come a time when you want to or need to rename a database. In this tip we look at a couple different options.

SQL Server Forced Plans Overwite the Query Hash

A 16-year old SQL Server bug that means 'forced plans' have the query plan hash in place of the expected query hash. Includes an explanation and discussion of the term 'morally equivalent plan'.

The New Log File

Renaming a Database

How Do You Patch 100 Database Servers?

The challenges of managing lots of system are significant and there aren't easy solutions, but Steve has a few thoughts on what you can do.

How Many Indexes Is Too Many?

Let’s start with the Stack Overflow database (any size will work), drop all the indexes on the Users table, and run a delete: