I frequently need to see rowcounts and execution time for queries while they’re running. Maybe I’m troubleshooting a slow query that’s still executing, or I want to understand which operators are causing the slowdown before the query completes.
Last week at the PASS Summit I learned some little nuances about how this works that I’d missed.
While every managed database service has high points and low points, there are three things that make RDS for SQL Server shine in comparison to Azure SQL Managed Instance: options for a higher memory:vCPU ratio, a well documented API that works beautifully with python, and fast and effective customer support that isn’t painful to use.
It’s just three things, but they make a huge difference. And these are three things that Microsoft can, and SHOULD, really fix for their cloud database services.
Forcing plans with Query Store can be a powerful tool— until it mysteriously fails. In real production systems, plan forcing sometimes just… doesn’t work. One common culprit is the cryptic OPTIMIZATION_REPLAY_FAILED error.
If you’re hitting OPTIMIZATION_REPLAY_FAILED, try re-forcing the plan using @disable_optimized_plan_forcing=1.
Statistics in SQL Server are simple in theory: they help the optimizer estimate how many rows a query might return.
In practice? Things get weird fast. Especially when you start filtering on multiple columns, or wondering why the optimizer thinks millions of rows are coming back when you know it’s more like a few hundred thousand.
In this post, I’ll walk through examples using single-column, multi-column, and filtered statistics—and show where estimates go off the rails, when they get back on track, and why that doesn’t always mean you need to update everything with FULLSCAN.
Views let you do dumb things by accident in SQL Server. Then they make you have to think way too hard to fix them.
‘Is it just me, or is SQL Server quality slipping?’
I asked myself that question for couple/few years until I faced up to it: SQL Server is well into a period where Microsoft investment is waning, and Microsoft regularly isn’t able to deliver the features they promise.
I listened to ‘Surviving the A.I. Endgame’ this weekend and realized: I’ve become one of the believers that AI advances are very likely to completely change tech and knowledge roles as we know them over the next 10 years. This is going to dramatically shrink the workforce across MANY roles (and many of those impacted will be outside of the tech sector). It isn’t that people won’t be needed anymore, but far fewer people will be needed. Including people with database administrator (DBA) roles like mine.
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