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For this month's T-SQL Tuesday, Brent Ozar (blog|Instagram) asks us to describe the most recent ticket we closed. “We had a pretty significant wait spike…” The literal last ticket I closed was “please run this script in production…”, and I don’t think it …
Continue readingWe’ve all been there. You’ve got a query where the JOIN or WHERE predicate is not SARGable. You’ve read about how this can be a problem, and how bad it is for performance. Alas, you cannot change the query. Sometimes this reason is political, sometimes it’s …
Continue readingEvery time someone shrinks a database, a kitten dies. Stop shrinking your tempdb data files I recently wrote about growing, shrinking, and removing tempdb files. In that article I explained that SQL Server won’t move a page that contains an internal worktable …
Continue readingThere’s a lot of advice out there on the internet that suggests that you should not install SSMS on your database servers running SQL Server. This came up at work recently, where I was asked “Should we install SSMS on our database servers?” and my answer is:
Continue readingAaron attempting a STONE_SPLIT at a recent curling competition. This morning, my friend Aaron Bertrand (blog|twitter) posted a plea for help with STRING_SPLIT() improvements. I'm very much in Aaron's corner on this, having written about the olden days myself. …
Continue readingChanging a column from int to bigint has gotten a lot easier since I started working on SQL Server back at the turn of the century. SQL Server 2016 introduced the ability to do ALTER TABLE...ALTER COLUMN as an online operation using the WITH (ONLINE=ON) …
Continue readingOnly one thing can spark more joy than cleaning up old data. Doggos. Yesterday, I talked about batching deletes, and the day before I talked about how much I like to delete data, and why it's necessary to do it, despite being a data packrat. Today, let’s look …
Continue readingI get a thrill from roller coasters, but for some people it just makes them purge their lunch. DBAs & Data professionals tend to be digital pack rats. My personal Google Drive is filled with random files that I refused to part with–even though it’s of …
Continue readingOn August 28, 2018 at 2PM EDT, I’ll be joining Melissa Connors (blog|twitter), Kevin Kline (blog|twitter), and Rob Sewell (blog|twitter) for a webinar on advanced SQL Server features. The webinar centers around a real-life case study of technology SentryOne …
Continue readingI was recently doing a training session when a developer commented that it was OK to run an expensive query twice because on the second execution, SQL Server would use the “results cache” and be “practically free”. It’s not the first time I’ve heard someone …
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