SQL Server 2016’s Query Store feature promises to be better than Plan Guides ever were. The Query Store lets you track query performance, collect execution plans, and force a specific plan if you notice that a query is sometimes fast, and sometimes slow.
Whenever you’ve got a new feature, one of the first things to ask is, “What happens when I break it?”
Because we’re going to break stuff.
When you need to measure how long a query takes and how many resources it uses, STATISTICS TIME and STATISTICS IO are great tools for interactive testing in SQL Server. I use these settings constantly when tuning indexes and query.
It’s just two weeks until I’ll be teaching index tuning in Huntington Beach, California.
This day long session is $99 – and it’s a great time of year to plan a quick visit to California, no?
I like SQL Server’s new Live Query Statistics feature a lot for testing and tuning large queries. One of my first questions was whether this could replace using actual execution plans, or if it’s useful to use both during testing.
Finding: Both are useful. And both can impact query performance.
Data types are hard.
I’ve been working on some demo code for table partitioning. I have a table partitioned by a column named FakeBirthDateStamp, which is a DATETIME2(0) column. The table is a partitioned heap. At this point in the demo, I hadn’t built any indexes. I wanted to show that partition elimination could occur on a partitioned table, even without a clustered index.
Managing indexes got trickier with SQL Server 2012. SQL Server has tracked and reported statistics on how often indexes are used and requested since SQL Server 2005. As of SQL Server 2012, suddenly all that information started getting reset whenever anyone ran ALTER INDEX REBUILD.
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