The Era of The Shared SQL Server Database is Finally Ending

For more than 20 years, many small and medium SaaS companies have built products with complicated business logic and a flexible user experience on the .NET stack using an architecture with a shared SQL Server database. This approach has kept the production environment relatively simple.

These companies have new incentives to move away from this architecture because agentic development lands new business rules on the shared database fast enough to painfully cut velocity and add significant risk to deployments.

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Erik Darling and Kendra Little Rate SQL Server Perf Tuning Techniques

Erik Darling joins Kendra Little to rate different SQL Server Performance Tuning Techniques in episode 81 of the Dear SQL DBA podcast. We share our opinions of… (deep breath)

Recompile hints, Query Store hints and plan forcing, CTEs, Resource Governor, the legacy cardinality estimator, Table Variables, Automatic Plan Correction, Batch Mode, index rebuilds, Hekaton, NOLOCK, page compression, partitioning, filtered indexes, columnstore, join hints, PSPO, indexed hints, indexed views, optimize for unknown, RCSI, adding more memory, restarting the damn thing, scalar UDFs, and Persisted Memory Grant Feedback.

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Batch Mode Hacks for Rowstore Queries in SQL Server

What’s batch mode?

Batch mode was introduced as a way to help SQL Server process data from columnstore indexes faster. The whole idea with columnstore is that you pull big compressed sets of rows out for aggregation or other operations in big chunks.

Batch mode is a way that operators can work on a “batch” of up to 900 values at a time, instead of working on individual rows. Batch mode can reduce the overhead of metadata and make more efficient use of your CPUs.

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Columnstore Index Returns Zero Rows... Which is One Row

I’ve never claimed to be great at math, but until recently I thought I knew how to count to one. Zero… one. That’s what we learned in kindergarten.

Apparently SQL Server didn’t go to kindergarten.

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