About

I'm Ali Elmi. I work with SQL Server day to day — administration and performance work on production databases that have to keep running.

This site is where I write that work down. The focus is narrow on purpose: query performance, execution plans, indexing, and the slow drift that turns a healthy database into a slow one over a period of years. Occasionally the tooling around it, including where automation and LLM-based agents genuinely help with database diagnostics and where they quietly mislead you.

How posts here work

Everything is reproducible. Each post is built on a public sample database — StackOverflow, WideWorldImporters, or AdventureWorks — and includes the script to set up the scenario and observe the behaviour yourself. If I can't reduce something to a runnable repro, I don't write it up.

That's partly a quality bar and partly a boundary: nothing here comes from my employer's systems, schemas, data, or incidents. Everything published is either reproducible on public data or general enough to be common knowledge.

Contact

Contact details are being set up and will appear here shortly.