Microsoft recently introduced a handy new feature to query plans: waitstats. That’s right, you can get actual runtime waitstats for a query you run.
Category: Administration
DBA 101: File growth
Maintaining a database is an important job of the DBA role. One of the many maintenance tasks is ensuring that the disk does not fill up and your files are able to grow over time.
DBA 101: Unique Constraint vs Unique Index
Designing a rock solid application and database can be difficult. New features and overlapping features mean that you’re able to accomplish a single task in many ways. For instance the numeric and decimal data types. Which should you use?Read More »
DBA 101: What you may be missing with “Missing indexes”
If you’ve read my blog, I’m sure by now you know that I have no love for GUI tools. I will say they are improving every day and maybe, just maybe, we will see the day when you can click happily away and do everything you want. Sadly, this is not the day.
A while back, SSMS added the “Missing Index” data to the graphical query plan. They even made it really easy to add.
DBA 101: Altering a column
People always ask me what tools I use. Mostly this question comes from the topic of monitoring. I can honestly say that I don’t love any tools and you shouldn’t either.
My time at Microsoft placed me at nearly 300 different clients. As a Microsoft employee I never liked saying, “Go grab this tool so we can look at your problem because SSMS isn’t good enough.”
Using Memory Optimized tables for reporting
I recently worked on a project for fraud. This project needed to relate 67 million accounts to one another “Kevin Bacon” style. This means that each unique account may tie to another account on ssn, email, home phone, business phone, or any other PII type metric.
What keeps clearing my query stats?
I was building out a blog post about cardinality today and noticed that sys.dm_exec_query_stats was getting cleared my my Surface Pro 3 dev instance about every 30 to 60 seconds.
I opened object explorer to check if any jobs were running in SQL Agent that may be running DBCC FREEPROCCACHE
Query Tuning 101: Debugging a procedure
I was recently asked to help tune a stored procedure that has been historically taking between 55 and 60 seconds to complete. Overall the code wasn’t too complex but getting to the root cause did surprise me a bit.
Query tuning 101: How to measure Query Plan I/O cost
If you’re a DBA or a developer chances are you’ve looked at a query plan or two. While looking at your plan you may have noticed that each operator has a cost. Did you know that the cost is measurable?
Query tuning 101: Problems with IN ()
If you’re a DBA or database developer, chances are you will have to write or rewrite queries from time to time. Rewriting may be for new features or simply to improve the performance of existing code.
SQL TECH BLOG 