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Month: June 2026
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Installing PGAdmin on Linux Mint
Last Updated: August 12, 2026 This is a quick walkthrough of how I installed pgAdmin on Linux Mint. pgAdmin is one of the main management and query tools for PostgreSQL, which I like to use in conjunction with DBeaver. Installation The pgAdmin tool isn’t in the standard Linux Mint repositories, only phpPgAdmin, which is a…
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Schema Prefixing is Important
In this post, we’ll look at why it is important to prefix objects with their schema and look at an example where not prefixing objects with schemas can cause unexpected results. For this post, we’ll use the Northwind database, made available by Microsoft at the Northwind database repository on GitHub. I have made some modifications…
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SQL Server – Working Smarter, Not Harder (Again)
Last Updated: August 12, 2026 In the last post we talked about the concept of creative laziness and how SQL Server’s query optimizer notices when the user has asked for something that requires no actual work due to a logical contradiction. In this post, we’ll look at another example of where the optimizer works smarter…
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SQL Server – Working Smarter, Not Harder
Back in my university days, a lecturer of mine would say how programmers are experts in “creative laziness” He was referring to practices such as using methods and classes in C# – constructs that mean as a developer, you follow the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) ethos – you are saving yourself time by writing things…
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SQL Server Version Store Growing
Enabling Read Committed Snapshot Isolation (RCSI) or snapshot isolation on a database changes the locking behaviour from that of SQL Server’s default, Read Committed isolation. With RCSI or Snapshot Isolation enabled, readers no longer block writers and vice versa, though writers can still block writers. This is implemented by creating and using a version store…
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Triggers use the version store
Last Updated: June 14, 2026 Here’s one I stumbled across recently – I was monitoring tempdb space and could see some version store usage on a database that did not have snapshot or Read Committed Snapshot Isolation enabled, I was puzzled by this, but eventually found the answer. What is the Version Store? As a…
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Don’t Miss a Beat: How Blocking Can Cause Unintended GETDATE() Behaviour
I was working on some SQL Server code recently which needed to check if an event that is logged to a table has completed and perform an action if it had. The way I looked to implement this was to run an agent job every 5 minutes to see if an event had occurred in…