28Mar 2011 by Grant Fritchey 10 Comments

SQL Saturday #67 Wrap-up

PASS
Just… Wow. What an event. What a great group of people. I’m just so lucky to be involved with fantastic individuals like these. Thanks for having me out to play everyone, I really appreciated it. SQL Saturday #67 started for me with my second FreeCon (follow the link for details on the first one). Brent Ozar (blog|twitter) put together another great session where we spent a lot of time talking about blogs and blogging as well as swoops through other topics. We, by the way, is like a who’s who of great SQL Server people. I’m not going to post the list just in case everyone doesn’t want to be outed. However, I found the event extremely useful. I have a ton of notes and action items for myself and…
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21Mar 2011 by Grant Fritchey 10 Comments

Communication

Object Relational Mapping, SQL Server, T-SQL, Tools, Visual Studio
It sure seems like there’s a lot of miscommunication between developers and database specialists. In fact, the communication can become so poor that outright hostility between the groups is common. At the end of the day we are all working towards a common goal, to add value to whatever organization we are working for. It's a shame that we all lose sight of this commonality and create such a false dichotomy between the groups. I think there are some ways that we, as database specialists, can use to attempt to cross that gap. Prior to being suborned to the dark side, I was a developer. I had a little over 10 years experience working in VB, Java & C#. I remember, distinctly, cursing our database team for being so problematic…
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17Mar 2011 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

Where does slow performance come from?

SQL Server, T-SQL, Visual Studio
I have my opinions and experience, and I’ve no doubt you have yours. Paul Randal (blog|twitter) has put up another one of his interesting surveys to try to collect our opinions and our experience. You should run right over to here and vote immediately. Now that you’ve completed that, I’ll tell you what I think. Based on my experience (neither particularly broad, nor particularly deep, but there has been quite a bit of it), I’ve mostly seen problems in code. When talking about databases, the T-SQL code. When talking about apps, the application code. This is followed not too far back by really poor database structures and poor indexing strategies. I’m sure other people have seen other things, but these really are the areas where I’ve seen the most problems. The one…
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14Mar 2011 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

ANSI Connection Settings

SQL Server, T-SQL
It’s reasonably well known that you can get different execution plans if you change the ANSI connection settings. But the question comes up, fairly often, how do you know what the settings are. It’s actually surprisingly simple. They’re stored right inside the execution plan, but they’re in one of the operators that most people ignore. Heck, I used to ignore this operator. Which operator is it you ask? Let’s find out. Let’s use AdventureWorks2008R2 (because I’m lazy). We’ll call one of the stored procedures there like so: EXEC dbo.uspGetBillOfMaterials @StartProductID = 0, -- int     @CheckDate = '2011-03-10 02:31:39' – datetime If you execute this with “Include Actual Execution Plan” enabled you’re likely to end up with the following execution plan: Don’t worry about the fact that you can’t really…
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07Mar 2011 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Execution Plan Stability

SQL Server
I’ve talked before about one of the primary things that the Query Optimizer team at Microsoft tries to avoid, regressions. Basically, they want a plan that worked well in SQL Server 2005 to work well in SQL Server 2008 R2. What’s more, they want everything to work well between service packs, updates and cumulative updates. Ever wonder how they do it? Well, they cheat. OK, that’s mean and not entirely accurate, but it gets the idea across. No, what they do is, identify when they have a breaking change, when they’ve got a special cumulative update or service pack that fixes some bad behavior, but that can cause plans to “break,” they wall it off. Note, in most cases, this “breakage” is actually a question of plans working correctly, but…
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