I’ve been having lots of fun drawing and doing webcasts this summer. I’ve got four SQL Server themed desktop wallpapers to share, and I’ve got lots more coming– along with a new chunk of free webcasts.
Grab wallpapers at https://github.com/LitKnd/littlekendracomments/tree/main/SQLWorkbooks-Wallpaper-and-Posters.
Table partitioning makes execution plans a bit more confusing.
I have a free online course which walks you through decoding execution plans, including whether or not partition elimination occurred.
SQL Server has more than one way to pull pages in from disk for your queries. SQL Server can do a physical read of an 8KB page, or an extent of 8 of those 8KB pages.
Collecting perfmon counters from SQL Server databases where you are using database mirroring is a little tricky
The counters won’t behave “normally” until after you set up mirroring for a database.
You’ve got some troubling wait stats in SQL Server. How can you tell which queries are causing those waits?
Learn the pros and cons of different techniques to track down the cause of both common and tricky waits in SQL Server, including CXPACKET, PAGEIOLATCH, LCK, RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE, and THREADPOOL waits.
Batch mode was introduced as a way to help SQL Server process data from columnstore indexes faster. The whole idea with columnstore is that you pull big compressed sets of rows out for aggregation or other operations in big chunks.
Batch mode is a way that operators can work on a “batch” of up to 900 values at a time, instead of working on individual rows. Batch mode can reduce the overhead of metadata and make more efficient use of your CPUs.
Copyright (c) 2025, Catalyze SQL, LLC; all rights reserved. Opinions expressed on this site are solely those of Kendra Little of Catalyze SQL, LLC. Content policy: Short excerpts of blog posts (3 sentences) may be republished, but longer excerpts and artwork cannot be shared without explicit permission.