Every now and again, I need use a global temporary table for some testing or demo code.
Each time I do, I stumble a little bit when it comes to checking for the existence of the global temp table, in order to make my code re-runnable.
I recently did a Dear SQL DBA episode answering a question about lock timeouts and memory in SQL Server. I really enjoyed the episode, and thought it would be fun to follow up and show what it looks like if SQL Server doesn’t have enough memory to allocate locks.
An important query is suddenly slow. Is it because statistics are out of date? This is tricky to figure out, and updating statistics right away can make troubleshooting even harder. Learn how to use query execution plans to get to the heart of the question and find out if stats are really your problem, or if it’s something else.
In this 35 minute episode:
Code samples are at the bottom of the page
I’ve never claimed to be great at math, but until recently I thought I knew how to count to one. Zero… one. That’s what we learned in kindergarten.
Apparently SQL Server didn’t go to kindergarten.
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.
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