The Big Red Button: How to Use sp_Kill

Proposed session for SQLBits 2026

TL; DR

In this quick talk, Brent Ozar introduces sp_Kill, a safer alternative to restarting SQL Server during emergencies. Learn when to push the big red button, how to identify runaway sessions, and how to kill the right queries while logging everything for later analysis.

Session Details

Production is on fire, users are screaming, and someone is hovering over the server restart button. This quick talk is about what to do before that happens.

Brent Ozar introduces sp_Kill, a new open source stored procedure designed for performance emergencies. It's designed to help when runaway queries, blocking transactions, or forgotten sessions are dragging the entire server down. This isn’t a tool for careful, glove-on analysis. It’s built for real-world scenarios where you need to act quickly, safely, and with guardrails.

Brent will walk through common emergency situations: bad query plans, sleeping sessions with open transactions, jobs running at the wrong time. He'll show how sp_Kill helps identify what’s going wrong, log everything for later analysis, and guide you toward the least risky sessions to terminate. You’ll see how sp_Kill balances speed with safety, why blind killing is dangerous, and how this approach is still far better than restarting SQL Server out of desperation.

If you’ve ever wished for a big red button that’s smarter than "Restart", this session is for you.

3 things you'll get out of this session

Who sp_Kill is for (and who it's not for) How to use the most common parameters How to set it up so your help desk can run it

Brent Ozar's other proposed sessions for 2026

20 Years of the Cloud: What Changed, What Didn’t, and What’s Next - 2026

AI in Your Career: Sidekick, Hero, or Villain? - 2026

Calling AI from T-SQL: Real-Life Lessons from sp_BlitzCache - 2026

Pokémon Battle, Choose Your Index: You Can’t Have Them All - 2026

Watch Brent Tune a Query in SQL Server 2025 - 2026

Brent Ozar's previous sessions

300-Level Guide to Career Internals: Planning Your Career

A roadmap of options for your career.

Fragmentation Explained in 20 Minutes

What do index rebuilds and defrags really do?

Fundamentals of Stored Procedures

How to write stored procedures that have a high likelihood of performing well and are easy to troubleshoot.

300-Level Guide to Career Internals: Planning Your Career

Isn't it awkward when someone asks you, "So, where do you see yourself 5 years from now?" Brent Ozar will share how he analyzed the data job market to build his career path.

500-Level Guide to Career Internals: Building a Brand

If you want to work for yourself, you need to be able to sell yourself. I know, I hate it too - it feels gross when I write it that way. I'm Brent Ozar. You recognize my name, that's why you wanna learn this from me.

Deadlocks: Lets Do One, Understand It, and Fix It

You keep getting warnings and emails about deadlocks, but let's be honest: you're not really sure how they happen or what to do about it. Brent Ozar will show one, use sp_BlitzLock to analyze it, then fix it.

"But It Worked in Development!" 3 Hard Performance Problems

You've been performance tuning queries and indexes for a few years, but lately, you've been running into problems you can't explain. Could it be RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE, THREADPOOL, or lock escalation?

Easy Performance Tuning: an Intro to Wait Statistics

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How to Pick SQL Server Hardware

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How the SQL Server Engine Thinks

How does SQL Server build results? We'll role play: Brent Ozar will be an end user sending in queries, and you'll be SQL Server. This session is for people who are comfortable writing queries, but not with indexes, statistics, and sargability.

Watch Brent Tune Queries

Ever wonder how someone else does it? There’s no right way or wrong way, but in this session you can peer over Brent’s shoulder (virtually) while he takes a few Stack Overflow queries and tries various techniques to make them faster.

Virtualization and SAN Basics for DBAs

These two technologies can make a very big – and very bad – difference in how your SQL Server performs. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get the real, honest lowdown from a virtualization administrator, a SAN administrator, and a DBA? Wouldn’t it be even better if one person had done all three, and could give you the pros and cons of each point of view? That person is Brent Ozar, a Microsoft Certified Master who’s been there and done that.

SQL Server Storage - 1,000GB Level

PANIC IN THE DATACENTER! Your databases are approaching - or surpassed - the Terrible Terabyte mark. You're pouring money into the SAN, but your data isn't pouring back out as fast as you want. You're terrified to DBCCs or index maintenance because everything takes forever, and you don't have big maintenance windows.