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.
I’ve set things up so you can quickly download desktop wallpapers featuring cartoons and SQL Server concepts. Get ‘em here 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.
It can be tricky to remember that SQL Server doesn’t short circuit on IF statements in stored procedures. Even when you know this, sometimes it’s hard to recognize the impacts.
Working with maintenance plans is supposed to be easy, but I find it to be quite difficult.
Sharpen your performance tuning and indexing skills this summer, for free, one week at a time!
The free sp_WhoIsActive procedure by Adam Machanic can be very useful for monitoring SQL Server: I’m a big fan.
But I’ve learned the hard way that it’s easy to collect too much information with sp_WhoIsActive, particularly if you set up jobs where you have the procedure log data to a table for later review. Collecting the text of SQL Server queries, their execution plans, and more, can take up a lot of room, and I’ve managed to fill up a server drive or two with a little over-eager collection. Whoops!
You’ve got a performance problem and you know just the cool index trick that will fix it! Until it goes utterly wrong. Join me for this free session in the 24 hours of PASS to see multiple quick demos of index changes that seem like a great idea… until they either don’t work, or make things worse. How to sign up My session is on Wed, July 19, 9 am Pacific / 12 pm Eastern / 4pm UTC.
Microsoft recently gave us a more lightweight way to trace data related to execution plan performance. As of SQL Server 2014 SP2, you can trace the query_thread_profile Extended Event.
When I was recently working on the course, “Should Developers Manage Index Maintenance?” I explained that in my experience, statistics maintenance can make more of a difference to performance than index maintenance can.
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