Execution plans got a cool new piece of diagnostic information in SQL Server 2012 SP3, SQL Server 2014 SP2, and SQL Server 2016: “Number of Rows Read”. In fancy language, this is “better diagnostics” when a query plan has “residual predicate pushdown” (KB 3107397).
It’s a big week for me! I’m moving on from Brent Ozar Unlimited.
Recompile hints have been tough to love in SQL Server for a long time. Sometimes it’s very tempting to use these hints to tell the optimizer to generate a fresh execution plan for a query, but there can be downsides.
I recently gave a day long session at the SQLPASS Summit called “SQL Server Index Therapy Session”. 61 people attended, and let me tell you I was thrilled with that number. I’ve co-presented lots of day and week long sessions, but this was the first day long session that I’d ever done solo at a conference and 61 people was a terrific number.
Update, Feb 2017:
Here’s Microsoft’s overview of what the telemetry collects: https://www.microsoft.com/EN-US/privacystatement/SQLServer/Default.aspx
Working with table partitioning can be puzzling. Table partitioning isn’t always a slam dunk for performance: heavy testing is needed. But even getting started with the testing can be a bit tricky!
Here’s a (relatively) simple example that walks you through setting up a partitioned table, running a query, and checking if it was able to get partition elimination.
I’ve been thinking about taking up a new programming language as a hobby for a little while. There’s a vibrant software community here in Portland, and working in more languages than TSQL opens up lots more opportunities for fun. I have no intention of becoming a full-time Python programmer, I just believe it’s fun to code and good to challenge your brain in new ways.
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