I gave a day long session, “SQL Server Index Formulas, Problems and Solutions” in Huntington Beach, CA on April 1. The class was a great group of students, and we had a lively discussion and lots of questions.
Here’s a topic we diagrammed in class, as well as links to extra resources.
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.
You’re just getting started as a SQL Server Database Administrator – or you’re trying to get there.
Here’s a learning plan and links to free articles and scripts that will equip you to tackle the three most critical skills to for DBAs.
Whenever you’ve got a new feature, one of the first things to ask is, “What happens when I break it?”
Because we’re going to break stuff.
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.
SQL Server 2016 brought in a cool new little feature for table partitioning: you can now truncate individual partitions. There’s one little gotcha, though: you can only do this if all the indexes on the tables are “aligned”.
It’s just two weeks until I’ll be teaching index tuning in Huntington Beach, California.
This day long session is $99 – and it’s a great time of year to plan a quick visit to California, no?
I like SQL Server’s new Live Query Statistics feature a lot for testing and tuning large queries. One of my first questions was whether this could replace using actual execution plans, or if it’s useful to use both during testing.
Finding: Both are useful. And both can impact query performance.
@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
Data types are hard.
I’ve been working on some demo code for table partitioning. I have a table partitioned by a column named FakeBirthDateStamp, which is a DATETIME2(0) column. The table is a partitioned heap. At this point in the demo, I hadn’t built any indexes. I wanted to show that partition elimination could occur on a partitioned table, even without a clustered index.
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