16Jul 2012 by Grant Fritchey 12 Comments

SQL In The City: London 2012, Recap

Professional Development, Redgate Software, T-SQL, Tools
Wow! How's that for a recap? The concept for the SQL in the City events is pretty simple. Put on a free event that instructs people on SQL Server, Azure, and related technologies along with a healthy smattering of Red Gate tools. All teaching is done by some of the best people in the business (and me). This was the second event in London. The concept was launched there last year and succeeded quite well. This year the event filled it's registrations so quickly that Red Gate felt obligated to have a second day, which almost completely filled up too. There were more than 350 people in attendance on Friday, and then, on Saturday, a day off, another 250+ people showed up. That's well over 600 attendees over the two…
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02Jul 2012 by Grant Fritchey 12 Comments

Querying Information from the Plan Cache, Simplified

SQL Server, T-SQL
One of the great things about the Dynamic Management Objects (DMOs) that expose the information in plan cache is that, by their very nature, they can be queried. The plans exposed are in XML format, so you can run XQuery against them to pull out interesting information. For example, what if you wanted to see all the plans in cache that had a Timeout as the reason for early termination from the optimizer? It’d be great way to see which of your plans were less than reliable. You could so like this: WITH XMLNAMESPACES(DEFAULT N'http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2004/07/showplan'), QueryPlans AS ( SELECT RelOp.pln.value(N'@StatementOptmEarlyAbortReason', N'varchar(50)') AS TerminationReason, RelOp.pln.value(N'@StatementOptmLevel', N'varchar(50)') AS OptimizationLevel, --dest.text, SUBSTRING(dest.text, (deqs.statement_start_offset / 2) + 1, (deqs.statement_end_offset - deqs.statement_start_offset) / 2 + 1) AS StatementText, deqp.query_plan, deqp.dbid, deqs.execution_count, deqs.total_elapsed_time, deqs.total_logical_reads, deqs.total_logical_writes FROM…
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