Blogs

My Wordpress Setup: Canvas, MailChimp, GravityForms and Other Tools

My Wordpress Setup: Canvas, MailChimp, GravityForms and Other Tools

on December 10, 2015 • 4 min read

I recently gave LittleKendra.com a bit of a refresh. I wanted the website to be colorful, personal, and approachable.

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Joins, Predicates, and Statistics in SQL Server

Joins, Predicates, and Statistics in SQL Server

on December 8, 2015 • 4 min read

Joins can be tricky. And where you put your ‘where’ clause may mean more than you think!

Take these two queries from the AdventureWorksDW sample database. The queries are both looking for data where SalesTerritoryCountry = ‘NA’ and they have the same joins, but the first query has a predicate on SalesTerritoryCountry while the second has a predicate on SalesTerritoryKey.

/* Query 1: Predicate on SalesTerritoryCountry */ select ProductKey, OrderDateKey, DueDateKey, ShipDateKey, CustomerKey, PromotionKey, CurrencyKey, fis.SalesTerritoryKey, SalesOrderNumber, SalesOrderLineNumber, RevisionNumber, OrderQuantity, UnitPrice, ExtendedAmount, UnitPriceDiscountPct, DiscountAmount, ProductStandardCost, TotalProductCost, SalesAmount, TaxAmt, Freight, CarrierTrackingNumber, CustomerPONumber, OrderDate, DueDate, ShipDate from dbo.FactInternetSales fis join dbo.DimSalesTerritory st on fis.SalesTerritoryKey=st.SalesTerritoryKey where st.SalesTerritoryCountry = N’NA’ GO

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Actual Number of Rows Read in SQL Server Execution Plans

Actual Number of Rows Read in SQL Server Execution Plans

By Kendra Little on December 3, 2015 • 3 min read

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).

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Does OPTION (RECOMPILE) Prevent Query Store from Saving an Execution Plan?

Does OPTION (RECOMPILE) Prevent Query Store from Saving an Execution Plan?

on November 25, 2015 • 3 min read

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.

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My SQLPASS 2015 Session Evaluations

My SQLPASS 2015 Session Evaluations

on November 24, 2015 • 2 min read

Category: indexing

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.

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