Let’s talk about what XLOCK is supposed to do. XLOCK is a table hint that can be applied to a query to place an exclusive lock on the resources that the query accesses. This can be very dangerous because an exclusive lock on a table or partition could cause significant performance concerns.
Category: Performance
Free SQL tuning tool: How’s My Database?
It’s taken longer than I thought it may and I’ve run into several problems along the way but had a few people in the MVP community swing some homeruns to help me complete the BETA of this new SQL Server community query tuning tool.
Hello Denver! I’m speaking this weekend
For those of you in the Denver area, SQL Saturday is this weekend! I’m speaking and hope to see you there.
If you haven’t registered yet, no problem. The details are here:
http://www.sqlsaturday.com/774/eventhome.aspx
There’s a ton of great speakers and you don’t want to miss this one.
Are scalar functions really a bad thing?
I’ve read a lot of things lately pointing to scalar functions as if they were the devil. In this blog I’m going to explore if that’s the case. Let’s have a look.
SQL Tuning: Finding statements for missing indexes
Missing indexes are an important part of the indexing strategy. I usually start with sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats to find both inefficient and unused indexes and then supplement with missing indexes.
The missing index DMVs are great but they’ve always been missing something.
Query tuning: Apply yourself
It’s Friday and I’m ready for the weekend as I’m sure everyone else is. This weekend I’m looking forward to getting yard work done and browsing through the whoisactive SQL Ops Studio extension code.
SQL Saturday Chicago: I’m speaking
If you’re in Chicago on March 17 and have some free time, why not check out all the cool kids?
STORPORT: Reading an ETL trace
One of the things I enjoy most is diagnosing storage latency. I honestly couldn’t tell you why I enjoy it so much; but, I just do. When it comes to storage in Windows one of the best things you can do is capture an ETL trace for the STORPORT driver.
PaaS and the ever changing role of the DBA
I’ve never been a fan of a GUI for DBA work. Give me a hand crafted script or a list of DMVs and I’m a happy camper.
Perfmon is probably my best friend. It’s always there and happy to tell me the truth. It seldom falters and has helped me get to root cause on even the toughest of performance issue. But what about PaaS?
SQL Server: The danger of large data types
Databases are platforms that are designed to securely store and retrieve your data. Perhaps that’s why they’re called a data “base”? So if your data is in a base, you’d want to lay it out in some logic way.
