SQL Server shop talk for its victims and accomplices.
Kendra Little hosts Dear SQL DBA with guests such as Erik Darling, Eugene Meidinger and Michael J Swart. The talk runs from query tuning and optimized locking to Power BI and automated deployments, and the banter is quick and silly while the opinions under it stay specific enough to act on.
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Dear SQL DBA is a podcast and YouTube show hosted by Kendra Little, and it sounds like colleagues talking shop with the camera on. The openings are part of the entertainment. There is a flubbed hello, a name that fails to appear on screen on cue, and a promise of a 'super official' welcome. Little has pitched the show to the victims and the accomplices of SQL Server, and elsewhere she welcomes anyone who is only database curious. Erik Darling appears in more than one recent episode and introduces himself as someone who makes SQL Server faster in exchange for money. Their conversations mix product judgement with running gags. When the two rate performance tuning techniques, automatic plan correction draws sharp criticism. It runs experiments on queries on top of Query Store, forgets what it learned after a failover or a statistics update, and starts over. It gets one participation star and a plea to leave the plans alone. Another Darling episode, 'Erik Darling and Kendra Little talk AI, SQL Server 2025, and the Future Is Text Files', includes a detour into buying a set of AI prompts. What arrived was a bunch of text files, and it was judged worth it anyway. Guests take the show beyond the engine. The Power BI episode with Eugene Meidinger explains why star schema, with fact tables surrounded by dimension tables, suits how that engine works. It also mentions a service designed to compress data on its own and ask less indexing work of its users. The conversation with Michael J Swart turns to automated deployments and whether to build or buy the tooling. The case for writing it in-house comes with a car metaphor: call the automobile association and someone else does the repair, but write it yourself and you are the mechanic, even if it breaks down more often. Jeremiah, introduced as a software engineer, a fellow database nerd and Little's husband, joins for optimized locking. They start by pretending the topic is SQL REST endpoints, then get to what taking fewer locks could save in memory for a company running databases as a cloud service. That episode signs off by calling itself a glimpse of how database nerds spend a Friday afternoon. The leadership conversation with Alex Robson steps sideways from databases. Little introduces him as a former Stack Overflow colleague who was director of engineering there while she was a technical product manager, and adds that he is very good at Destiny. Some sessions were streamed, and the goodbyes include thanks to people watching in the chat. The listener gets candid, specific opinions on SQL Server features, and the jokes around them never quite take over.
Made for: Suits a listener who works with SQL Server, Power BI or database deployments and wants candid opinions delivered as a relaxed, joking conversation rather than a formal tutorial.
What sets it apart: Its verdicts on SQL Server features are blunt and specific, like the single star it gives automatic plan correction, while the tone stays playful and self-mocking. The guest conversations also go beyond the engine into Power BI, deployment tooling and technical leadership.
Kendra Little's podcast discussing database performance tuning, software development, and working with data.
Automatic plan correction earns a participation star; your SQL Server grievances have found company.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded Dear SQL DBA conversation about AI prompts, text files, and SQL Server 2025.
Kendra Little and Eric Darling ground the AI conversation in the small realities of software work: writing prompts, asking AI to improve those prompts, and Little's $35 purchase of a prompt bundle that turned out to be plain text files.
A one-star verdict turns automatic plan correction into a sharp question about SQL Server control.
Kendra Little and Eric Darling give SQL Server automatic plan correction the kind of skeptical performance review that DBAs tend to value. Their one-star score lands because the feature is built on Query Store, tests whether queries improve or regress, and can forget what it…
A grounded tour of Power BI schemas, cascading filters, and the two engines inside VertiPaq.
Power BI performance tuning gets a practical model-level frame here, with Kendra Little and Eugene Meidinger tying report speed to the shape of the underlying model.
A grounded look at database automation, migration safety, and the real cost of owning the tools.
Database deployment becomes more interesting here because the hard part is not just creating automation, but owning what it does afterward. On Dear SQL DBA, Kendra Little and Michael J.
A pair of database specialists make Azure SQL optimized locking feel like a guided pass through unfamiliar blocking terrain.
Optimized locking gets a focused database-feature discussion as Kendra Little and Jeremiah Peshka walk through its place in the SQL Server engine, currently only in Azure SQL Database.
SQL Server talk with production instincts.
Microsoft Fabric trade-offs, talked through on the SQL Trail.
Specialists walking through software's tradeoffs, one system at a time.
Founders and engineers on AI coding agents like Claude Code, and supply chain security.
Eric Darling says AI is useful when he treats it like a junior developer, not when he expects expert SQL answers.
Dear SQL DBA has Kendra Little and Eric Darling rating SQL Server tuning techniques like `OPTION (RECOMPILE)`, Query Store hints, Resource Governor, and page compression.
Dear SQL DBA talks with Eugene Meidinger and Kendra Little about Power BI performance tuning across SQL, Power Query, and DAX.
Dear SQL DBA pairs Kendra Little with Michael J.
Kendra Little and Jeremiah Peshka break down Azure SQL Database's optimized locking, which replaces many row and page locks with transaction ID locks.
Alex Robson says leadership at Stack Overflow required deliberate communication and investment in relationships, not just visible coding.
Eric Darling says developer-friendly shortcuts such as reusable functions and `IS NULL` filters can make SQL Server’s work harder.
On DearSQL DBA, host Kendra Little and software developer Jeremiah Peschka examine tech interviews amid layoffs and job churn.
Kendra Little, in a live-streamed Dear SQL DBA episode, maps the differences between DBA, DBRE and data engineer roles using a trash metaphor from Eric Darling's reply that "I'm not sure that anyone knows." She contrasts a DBA tuning an individual "dumpster" with a DBRE automating many thousands of instances and a data engineer working in cloud data lakes with tools like Databricks, Snowflake and DBT.
Kendra Little uses the first three chapters of Gene Kim's The Unicorn Project, where developer Maxine finds new contractors who 'can't even check in code yet', to frame three gaps in database development.
Kendra Little discusses dealing with lack of control as a database administrator and promotes her live SQL seminars.
Kendra Little explains how to remove detrimental query hints from SQL Server code without modifying the application.