Foreign keys are an interesting feature of relational databases. They help enforce data integrity, sometimes help improve performance by eliminating joins, and sometimes slow down DML operations (inserts, updates, and deletes).
Off topic: The two cycle engine and your career path
I’ve been in technology for twenty years now. I’ve seen hundreds of environments, nearly 300 while employed at Microsoft alone.
One thing that I’ll always remember is my first day at Microsoft and not because I found out that health care was 100% free; though, that was a pleasant shocker. During New Employee Orientation (NEO), the trainer asked who had spouses that worked here and also who had worked here before.
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.
Nintendo NES Classic Edition giveaway! #SQLFamily
I’ve managed to get my hands on a Nintendo NES Classic and I’m going to give it away. The details are as follows:
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.
Why Halloween slowed your queries
Let me start by saying that this isn’t your typical post about the Halloween problem. This is intended to describe a couple different performance problems you should be keenly aware of.
Thank you to @MrDenny
I wanted to take a quick moment to thank Denny Cherry for selecting me for Speaker Idol this year.
SQL TECH BLOG 