Query tuning is an important process that will probably never go away and sharpening your tuning skills is always a good idea.
I’ve spoken on this topic many times and talked about probe residuals before. Mostly at SQL Saturday events and for some online webinars.
Simple post today: How to compare two plans in SSMS.
This task is a task that is often done by a DBA or developer who is wanting to compare changes of an index or perhaps even comparing queries between DEV and PROD.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
