04Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey 11 Comments

SQL Saturday in New England

PASS
Adam Machanic (blog|twitter) has put on a SQL Saturday/Data camp event in New England for the last two years. I've helped him both years. It's been very successful. In January we had over 300 attendees, making it one of the larger SQL Saturday events. But, with a single exception (thank you Tim Ford (blog|twitter)), we've only had local speakers. Mind you, we're somewhat lucky with speakers here in New England and have several MVPs and others who are truly excellent when presenting. I'm taking over from Adam to lead the effort for this year, and due to my schedule we're moving the event to the spring sometime. We were thinking about maybe making it the the weekend before SQL Rally. But, I've got a question for all of you who present at SQL Saturday events.…
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04Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

How to Tell if Execution Plans are Reused

SQL Server, T-SQL
I try to watch the search phrases that point people to the blog because sometimes, you get a sense of what problems people are running into. The latest question or phrase I've seen a lot lately is along the lines of "how do you know if an execution plan is being reused." Since compiling an execution plan can be an extremely expensive operation, it's worth your time to understand how well a given plan is getting reused. If you've seen me present, I'll frequently talk about the application that had a query with an 86 table join. Recompiles on that thing were frequent and extremely costly. The only good news was, they were recompiles. If we weren't getting plan reuse it would have been an even worse system than it was. There are…
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