Blogs

Merging Boundary Points: Does a Changing Partition_Number Indicate Data Movement?

Merging Boundary Points: Does a Changing Partition_Number Indicate Data Movement?

on June 7, 2016 • 6 min read

I received a question from a reader who was testing out a partitioning architecture:

We are testing table partitioning using one filegroup per partition. When we merge a boundary point, we see that partition_number changes in sys.partitions. Does this mean that data movement is occurring?

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Lost in Performance Troubleshooting - Perf Triage for SQL Server

Lost in Performance Troubleshooting - Perf Triage for SQL Server

By Kendra Little on June 2, 2016 • 5 min read

Psssttt – I have an updated blog post on this called the Learner’s Guide to SQL Server Performance Tuning

The SQL Server is slow, what should you do? I answer a reader question and share my strategy for performance troubleshooting.

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Testing an Insert for Race Conditions with Ostress.exe

Testing an Insert for Race Conditions with Ostress.exe

Whenever we have multiple sessions modifying data, things get tricky. When we have a pattern of “check if the data exists and then do a thing,” multiple sessions get even more complicated.

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Bleeding In Edgeville - When Upgrades Come Too Fast (Dear SQL DBA)

Bleeding In Edgeville - When Upgrades Come Too Fast (Dear SQL DBA)

By Kendra Little on May 26, 2016 • 4 min read

In this episode of “Dear SQL DBA,” I answer a question about early adoption of SQL Server, discuss why testing in production isn’t necessarily crazy, and recommend how to handle requests to upgrade your SQL Server to use new features.

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The Case of the Blocking Merge Statement (LCK_M_RS_U locks)

The Case of the Blocking Merge Statement (LCK_M_RS_U locks)

Recently I got a fun question about an “upsert” pattern as a “Dear SQL DBA” question. The question is about TSQL, so it lent itself to being answered in a blog post where I can show repro code and screenshots.

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Blogger Tip: Easy Free-Use Images with Pablo by Buffer

Blogger Tip: Easy Free-Use Images with Pablo by Buffer

By Kendra Little on May 19, 2016 • 1 min read

I’ve gotten a few compliments lately on the images I’ve been using in my posts. Images help engage your readers. You should also set a “featured image” for each post for thumbnail usage in your theme or in RSS readers. But it can be kind of a pain to search for images and make sure the image copyright allows you to use and share it.

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Index Usage Stats Bug Fixed in SQL Server 2012 SP2 CU12 / SP3 CU3

Index Usage Stats Bug Fixed in SQL Server 2012 SP2 CU12 / SP3 CU3

on May 18, 2016 • 2 min read

Category: indexing

Microsoft has just released a new round of cumulative updates for SQL Server 2012, and the release notes indicate that a fix to the sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats dynamic management view has been included in these updates. This is good news for index tuners using SQL Server 2012.

As of SP2 + CU12 and SP3 + CU3, SQL Server 2012 will persist index usage information even when ALTER INDEX REBUILD is run.

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