Here’s a great recent question that I got about query tuning and index use:
Assuming that the documented levels of data type precedence in SQL Server are true as of SQL 2016, why does a bigint value not force an index scan when compared against an int column?
The word ‘statistics’ is awfully confusing in SQL Server
It can mean “statistics” themselves – little objects that describe the distribution of data in columns or indexes to help the optimizer.
Or it can mean “usage statistics” - dynamic management views that let you see how many times an index has been used or requested, how many times a query has been run, that kind of thing.
I recently got a table partitioning question from a reader:
We now need to load some historical data into the table for 2013 so I want to alter the function and schema to add monthly partitions for this. But I can’t work out how to do this using SPLIT? Every example and tutorial I’ve looked at shows how to add new partitions onto the end of a range, not split one in the middle.
This week’s ‘Dear SQL DBA’ question gets us down to the essentials: how to I tell if a transaction is hanging?
I don’t find bugs in SQL Server all that often. I find bugs in my own code all the time.
In this case I double checked, and I think it’s a real SQL Server bug.
I recently received a question from a vendor about databases created by software vendors.
I’m not always the best at learning to use graphical interfaces. Maybe that’s why I often don’t like them?
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