Blogs

Adding Partitions to the Lower End of a Left Based Partition Function

Adding Partitions to the Lower End of a Left Based Partition Function

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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Confused by sp_who2 (Dear SQL DBA Episode 30)

Confused by sp_who2 (Dear SQL DBA Episode 30)

By Kendra Little on February 16, 2017 • 6 min read

This week’s ‘Dear SQL DBA’ question gets us down to the essentials: how to I tell if a transaction is hanging?

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The Top 3 Mistakes I Made Fighting Blocking

The Top 3 Mistakes I Made Fighting Blocking

on February 16, 2017 • 4 min read

Category: blocking , deadlocks , locking

At the beginning of the “Troubleshooting Blocking and Deadlocks” course, I mention that it took me a long time to get into using the tools I show in the course.

The tools are all free, and many of them are built into SQL Server.

Update: the course itself is now free, too!

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New online course: Troubleshooting Blocking & Deadlocks for Beginners (Free!)

New online course: Troubleshooting Blocking & Deadlocks for Beginners (Free!)

on February 14, 2017 • 2 min read

I made y’all a SQL Server style Valentine’s day present: a new FREE online training course.

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Should I Learn Fulltext Indexing? (Dear SQL DBA Episode 29)

Should I Learn Fulltext Indexing? (Dear SQL DBA Episode 29)

on February 9, 2017 • 7 min read

This week’s question is about a longstanding feature in SQL Server that sounds really cool: full-text search. If you’re learning performance tuning, how much time should you invest in researching and learning about full-text indexes?

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Understanding Left vs. Right Partition Functions (with Diagrams)

Understanding Left vs. Right Partition Functions (with Diagrams)

on February 7, 2017 • 3 min read

You’re designing table partitioning, or you want to make a change to an existing partition function. It’s critical to understand the difference between how “left” and “right” partition functions behave, but the documentation is a bit confusing on this topic.

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Index Types: Heaps, Primary Keys, Clustered and Nonclustered Indexes (Dear SQL DBA Episode 28)

Index Types: Heaps, Primary Keys, Clustered and Nonclustered Indexes (Dear SQL DBA Episode 28)

on February 2, 2017 • 10 min read

Category: indexing

I see HEAP tables are found even when I know those tables have a clustered index, and I see a lot of forwarded records. This happens to 5 tables in my database. I can see the clustered and in some ones the non-clustered indexes… why are some scripts reporting them as heaps?

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