I get a lot of requests about which books are helpful to learn performance tuning and database design. I totally get that – I still like learning with books. It doesn’t mean training videos or blogs are any less cool. They can all work together.
Should you look at automatically created statistics on your tables in SQL Server to help you design better indexes? Learn why in this 20 minute video, or subscribe to the Dear SQL DBA podcast.
No time to watch? Scroll on down, everything is written in article form below the video.
Here’s this week’s question:
As you tweak and test queries, it’s awfully useful to see how the performance has changed.
What tools in SQL Server will notify you about blocking and help track the queries behind your toughest blocking and deadlocking problems?
Every query tuner wants to explain exactly how much faster we made a query.
But sometimes SQL Server Management Studio adds noticeable overhead to the query duration. For relatively fast queries that return more than a few rows, just the overhead of displaying the results can skew your duration metric.
Should you always index your foreign keys? What if you index them, and then the index never gets used?
I recently mapped out my thought process for how I approach a new instance of SQL Server when it comes to index tuning.
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