In this episode of “Dear SQL DBA,” I answer a question about early adoption of SQL Server, discuss why testing in production isn’t necessarily crazy, and recommend how to handle requests to upgrade your SQL Server to use new features.
I’ve gotten a few compliments lately on the images I’ve been using in my posts. Images help engage your readers. You should also set a “featured image” for each post for thumbnail usage in your theme or in RSS readers. But it can be kind of a pain to search for images and make sure the image copyright allows you to use and share it.
I learned to do Change Management from some really smart people. When I first became a DBA, I worked at a small software company where changes were released with increasing frequency over the years. Our team was really great at planning and deploying changes, because we constantly worked at improving.
SQL Server 2016’s Query Store feature promises to be better than Plan Guides ever were. The Query Store lets you track query performance, collect execution plans, and force a specific plan if you notice that a query is sometimes fast, and sometimes slow.
When you need to measure how long a query takes and how many resources it uses, STATISTICS TIME and STATISTICS IO are great tools for interactive testing in SQL Server. I use these settings constantly when tuning indexes and query.
@SQLSista asked a fun question on Twitter recently about how to figure out the partitioning key on an existing table:
Bad Partitioned HEAP predates me. No clustered index, Primary Key on ID column and multiple datetime columns. How to find the partitioning key? #sqlhelp
Trainers and speakers need the code they write to be predictable, re-runnable, and as fast as possible. Faking writes can be useful for speakers and teachers who want to be able to generate some statistics in SQL Server’s index dynamic management views or get some query execution plans into cache. The “faking” bit makes the code re-runnable, and usually a bit faster. For writes, it also reduces the risk of filling up your transaction log.
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