About SQLYARD
We Inform, Help, and Support the SQL Server Community
Practical SQL Server knowledge, built from 20 years of real production experience and shared freely with the data community.
SQL Server got me. The deeper I went, the more I realized how powerful it actually was, and that realization just kept compounding. Every concept unlocked three more. Every problem solved revealed five more worth understanding. That curiosity never stopped.
The community made it something bigger. SQL Saturdays, PASS Summit, PASS online events, and years of reading the blogs these professionals published, that is where the real learning happened. Watching people like Brent Ozar, Paul Randal, Kendra Little, and dozens of others give their best material freely, whether in a conference room, a live online session, or a blog post published at midnight, made it clear that this community operated differently. The best people in the field were the most generous with what they knew.
Over 20 years, attending those events, reading the blogs, running the scripts, working through the problems, the knowledge accumulated. SQLYARD exists because of that. The articles, scripts, and tools on this site are free. That part was never a question. Alongside the free content, SQLYARD also offers paid consulting services and an AI Intelligence Suite for data teams that need hands-on expertise and advanced tooling. The knowledge sharing is free. The professional services are there for organizations that need more.
20 Years of Learning From the Best
I did not build this site in isolation. Everything here traces back to what I absorbed over 20 years attending PASS events, watching online sessions, showing up at SQL Saturdays, and spending countless hours reading the blogs and documentation that this community produced so freely. SQLYARD is the result of all of that. I learned from the best, and this site is how I give that back.
These are the organizations that built the infrastructure for that knowledge sharing. Without them the community would not have had the venues, the tools, or the culture that made it what it is:
- PASS and SQLSaturday
- Pragmatic Works
- SQLskills
- Brent Ozar Unlimited
- SentryOne
- Redgate Software
- Idera
- Quest Software
- ApexSQL
- Pluralsight
The People Who Shaped Me
This section is personal. These are the SQL Server professionals who directly shaped how I think, how I work, and why I built this site. I followed their blogs for years. I attended their PASS sessions online and in person. I ran their scripts on production servers. I read their posts at midnight trying to figure out why a query was slow or why a plan changed. I watched them give everything they knew through every channel available and ask for nothing back.
Every time I learned something that changed how I approached SQL Server, it traced back to one of these people. The way I read an execution plan, the way I look at wait statistics, the way I think about index design, the way I approach a performance problem at 2 AM: all of it has their fingerprints on it. SQLYARD exists because they made me want to keep learning and because they showed me that sharing knowledge freely is just what you do in this community.
If you are newer to SQL Server, these are the names worth knowing. Start with their blogs, their sessions, their open-source tools. You will not run out of things to learn.
Performance, Internals, and Query Optimization
Brent Ozar · Paul Randal · Kimberly Tripp · Paul White · Adam Machanic · Itzik Ben-Gan · Kalen Delaney · Benjamin Nevarez · Fabiano Amorim · Joe Sack · Pedro Lopes · Conor Cunningham · Bob Ward · Gail Shaw · Erik Darling · Glenn Berry · Jonathan Kehayias · Erin Stellato · Niko Neugebauer
DBA Operations, Administration, and Architecture
Kendra Little · Tara Kizer · Denny Cherry · Thomas LaRock · David Klee · Steve Jones · Louis Davidson · Kevin Kline · Aaron Bertrand · Ed Pollack · Robert Davis · Grant Fritchey · Greg Larsen · Paul Nielsen · Dejan Sarka · Steve Stedman · Monica Rathbun · John Sterrett · Pinal Dave · Bert Wagner · Wayne Sheffield · Sean McCown · Allen White · Ryan Adams · Russ Thomas · Argenis Fernandez
Community Leaders, Educators, and Advocates
Jeremiah Peschka · Richie Rump · Jen Stirrup · Julie Koesmarno · Karla Landrum · Kendal Van Dyke · Michelle Ufford · Lynn Langit · Buck Woody · Stacia Misner · Tim Mitchell · Jimmy May · Devin Knight · Bradley Ball · Andy Leonard · Aaron Nelson
PowerShell, Automation, and Open Source Tools
Chrissy LeMaire · Rob Sewell · Ola Hallengren · Aaron Nelson
If your name belongs here and is missing, that is an oversight, not an omission. The SQL Server community is large, generous, and impossible to fully capture in a single list.
Join the Conversation
The community gave to me through blogs, sessions, events, and years of freely shared knowledge. That generosity is what SQLYARD is built on and what keeps it going. If you have a question, a topic you want to see covered, a real-world problem worth writing up, or just want to connect with someone who has been in the SQL Server trenches for 20 years, reach out. The best content on this site has always come from real problems that real people are trying to solve.
That is how this community has always worked. Someone learns something, writes it down, shares it. Someone else finds it at midnight when they need it most. That cycle is worth keeping going.
What SQLYARD Covers
Content on this site spans the full scope of modern SQL Server and data platform work:
- SQL Server Administration: setup best practices, configuration, patching, service accounts, alerting, and the operational knowledge DBAs rely on daily.
- Performance Tuning: execution plan analysis, index design, wait statistics, MAXDOP tuning, query optimization, and the tools that surface real bottlenecks.
- High Availability and Disaster Recovery: Always On Availability Groups, log shipping, backup strategy, and failover planning for systems that cannot afford downtime.
- Automation and Health Monitoring: morning health checklists, maintenance scripts, Agent job monitoring, and processes that reduce repetitive work and improve reliability.
- Data Architecture and Business Intelligence: data warehouse design, lakehouse architecture, dimensional modeling, and the pipeline from raw data to business insight.
- Cloud Data Platforms: Azure SQL, Microsoft Fabric, cloud migration strategy, and hybrid deployments.
- AI for Data Professionals: LLMs, RAG, MCP, agents, and how AI is changing the tools available to DBAs and data architects in 2026 and beyond.
SQL Server Consulting
Alongside the free content, SQLYARD provides hands-on consulting and technical guidance for organizations that need experienced SQL Server expertise. Whether you are dealing with a performance crisis, planning a migration, designing a new architecture, or need a second set of eyes on a production system, I work directly with data teams to solve real problems.
- SQL Server performance reviews and tuning engagements
- Database architecture and design guidance
- Migration planning and execution: on-premises to cloud and version upgrades
- High availability design and implementation
- Health check assessments and remediation plans
- DBA automation and operational process improvement
If your team needs help, get in touch.