Confused by sp_who2 (Dear SQL DBA Episode 30)
Category:
monitoring-troubleshooting
This week’s ‘Dear SQL DBA’ question gets us down to the essentials: how to I tell if a transaction is hanging?
Tag: dear-sql-dba
The Top 3 Mistakes I Made Fighting Blocking
At the beginning of the “Troubleshooting Blocking and Deadlocks” course, I mention that it took me a long time to get into using the tools I show in the course.
The tools are all free, and many of them are built into SQL Server.
Update: the course itself is now free, too!
Should I Learn Fulltext Indexing? (Dear SQL DBA Episode 29)
Category:
query-performance
This week’s question is about a longstanding feature in SQL Server that sounds really cool: full-text search. If you’re learning performance tuning, how much time should you invest in researching and learning about full-text indexes?
Index Types: Heaps, Primary Keys, Clustered and Nonclustered Indexes (Dear SQL DBA Episode 28)
Category:
indexing
I see HEAP tables are found even when I know those tables have a clustered index, and I see a lot of forwarded records. This happens to 5 tables in my database. I can see the clustered and in some ones the non-clustered indexes… why are some scripts reporting them as heaps?
What is that Garbage in my Execution Plan? (Dear SQL DBA Episode 27)
Category:
query-performance
Today I was working on some code samples for a user question, and I hit a weird roadblock.
There was a bunch of garbage in my execution plan that I couldn’t explain. And by ‘garbage’, I mean a nested loop to a whole branch of code that I hadn’t asked SQL Server to run – and a warning about an implicit conversion possibly causing problems with the quality of my execution plan.
Why You Should Switch in Staging Tables Instead of Renaming Them (Dear SQL DBA Episode 26)
Category:
query-performance
, sql-server
Over the years, I’ve come across a pattern fairly frequently: an application in an OLTP database periodically creates new tables, loads some data into them and fixes it up, then does a switcheroo and replaces old tables with the new tables.
This can cause major problems with blocking if anyone else is querying the table.
Limiting Downtime for Schema Changes (Dear SQL DBA Episode 25)
Category:
database-administration
You need to release schema changes while the SQL Server is in use. Learn why code generation tools write odd scripts and how to stay sane amid rapid releases in this 28 minute video… or scroll down to read a summary.