I get a lot of requests about which books are helpful to learn performance tuning and database design. I totally get that – I still like learning with books. It doesn’t mean training videos or blogs are any less cool. They can all work together.
Should you look at automatically created statistics on your tables in SQL Server to help you design better indexes? Learn why in this 20 minute video, or subscribe to the Dear SQL DBA podcast. No time to watch? Scroll on down, everything is written in article form below the video. Here’s this week’s question: Dear SQL DBA, I’ve noticed that many indexes in my data warehouse aren’t used frequently.
I can’t wait to teach my full day course, SQL Server Index Formulas: Problems and Solutions in Seattle at the PASS Summit on Tuesday, October 25th. Woot! Less than 3 weeks away!
As you tweak and test queries, it’s awfully useful to see how the performance has changed.
What tools in SQL Server will notify you about blocking and help track the queries behind your toughest blocking and deadlocking problems?
Every query tuner wants to explain exactly how much faster we made a query.
But sometimes SQL Server Management Studio adds noticeable overhead to the query duration. For relatively fast queries that return more than a few rows, just the overhead of displaying the results can skew your duration metric.
Should you always index your foreign keys? What if you index them, and then the index never gets used?
I recently mapped out my thought process for how I approach a new instance of SQL Server when it comes to index tuning.
If you haven’t checked out Microsoft’s new WideWorldImporters sample database for 2016, it’s a pretty cool new little database. The database makes it easy to play around with new 2016 features, and it even ships with some cool little executables to run inserts in the “workload-drivers” folder.
Unique constraints and unique nonclustered indexes have a lot in common: unique constraints are implemented with a unique index behind the scenes.
While unique nonclustered indexes have a couple of additional features, I can still think of a scenario where it might be best to use unique constraints.
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