I just spent 90 minutes of my life figuring out a detail about sys.dm_exec_query_stats which I’m pretty sure I figured out five years ago, but didn’t write a blog post about.
Time to write a blog post, so I can save time when I go searching for this in a couple years.
Most of the time in SQL Server, the MAX() function and a TOP(1) ORDER BY DESC will behave very similarly.
If you give them a rowstore index leading on the column in question, they’re generally smart enough to go to the correct end of the index, and – BOOP! – just pluck out the data you need without doing a big scan.
SQL Server Management Studio version 17.5 adds a welcome feature for execution plans: a new visual attribute named EstimateRowsWithoutRowGoal.
Identifying that a query plan has been bossed around in Query Store can be a bit tricky, because it can appear in different ways.
I got a great question about transactions by email recently about transactions.
When I first created SQLWorkbooks, I distilled what it was all about down into one sentence: “Learn SQL Server by Solving Problems.”
This month, I introduce my first SQLChallenge, which distills that down into practice. The SQLChallenge features 23 minutes of video with scripts that you can use to reproduce and solve the problem yourself.
I got a question last week from a very smart fellow:
How can I tell when statistics were last updated for a heap?
Before I could email him back, I soon got another email in which he answered his own question.
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