Confused by sp_who2 (Dear SQL DBA Episode 30)
Category:
monitoring-troubleshooting
This week’s ‘Dear SQL DBA’ question gets us down to the essentials: how to I tell if a transaction is hanging?
The Top 3 Mistakes I Made Fighting Blocking
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!
New online course: Troubleshooting Blocking & Deadlocks for Beginners (Free!)
Category:
query-performance
I made y’all a SQL Server style Valentine’s day present: a new FREE online training course.
Should I Learn Fulltext Indexing? (Dear SQL DBA Episode 29)
Category:
query-performance
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?
Understanding Left vs. Right Partition Functions (with Diagrams)
Category:
tsql-programming
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.
Index Types: Heaps, Primary Keys, Clustered and Nonclustered Indexes (Dear SQL DBA Episode 28)
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?
Which Filegroup is that Partition Using? How Many Rows Does It Have?
Category:
tsql-programming
Table Partitioning in SQL Server has a bit of a learning curve. It’s tricky to just figure out how much data you have and where the data is stored.