15May 2008 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

FAST n Query Hint

SQL Server, T-SQL
Just because a doctor says take two aspirin, taking an entire case won't make you better. If one is good and two is better, 2 million might not be best.  What the heck am I talking about? We have an application that for one reason and another, has some overly complex procedures and queries. A lot of time and effort has been spent getting these queries to work well. Some of that time & effort came from one Microsoft consultant, Bill Sulcius. He's a great guy, very smart, very helpful and I learned a lot from him. On a few of the queries that Bill helped tune, he added some query hints, FAST 1 and KEEPFIXED PLAN. Where he added these hints, he could demonstrate, with good sets of data…
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21Apr 2008 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

SQL Server 2005 SP3

SQL Server
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Microsoft Connect really works. There has been a campaign going throughout the SQL Server community to get a new service pack out for SQL Server 2005. Microsoft had, at the very least, suggested that they were not going to release any more service packs for 2005. That's all changed now. I saw the announcement in Kalen Delaney's editorial from SQL Sever Magazine UPDATE. That's worth a read all on it's own. And consider this, 704 votes made this happen. That's 704 people who took the time & trouble to click their mouse a few times. If that's all it takes to influence Redmond, then you should all be over there using Connect as often as possible to get the fixes, changes or…
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11Apr 2008 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

nHibernate Database Benefits and Costs?

Object Relational Mapping, SQL Server
I posted this question over at SQL Server Central, just like my last post, I'm also posting it here. I need some help. I've been trying to research this and I can't find good, hard facts. Any help would be deeply appreciated. It looks like we might be facing a large project shifting over to using ORM methods through nHibernate. I'm trying to get a read from the database community on what exactly I should expect in terms of issues, challenges and headaches during the development process. I'm also interested in any long term maintenance issues, troubleshooting problems, etc. If your developers implemented ORM all the way down to storing object data on the database in a non-normalized/object oriented fashion, how did that affect you? Did it muck up reporting?…
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09Apr 2008 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

ORM Research

SQL Server
I posted this over at SQL Server Central, but I thought I'd repeat the question here: I really need some help on this one. One of our development teams is looking into ORM as a way to get code out the door faster. I've been doing a bunch of research on the topic (I'll post the links below) and I've found some interesting discussions over the pluses & minuses of the methdology. There are lots of positive examples of how well it works from all the vendors of various ORM products. I can't find any concrete examples of failed projects or long term maintenance nightmares or anything else like that. Even if ORM is the greatest thing since the flush toilet, there must be failures out there. Does anyone have…
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17Mar 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Presentation Last Week

Misc, SQL Server, T-SQL
Last week I presented at the Southern New England SQL Server User Group (SNESSUG) where I'm the Program Director. I presented from the book, Dissecting Execution Plans, that is supposed to be published any day now. I kept it basic and it flowed very well. The audience seemed receptive and there were a few questions. Mostly around figuring out what to do when you saw certain problems within the execution plans. Since that was the goal of the presentation, I was ready for most of the questions. I got stumped once on a Constant Scan operation. I finally looked it up this morning and feel silly. Here's the query: INSERT INTO [AdventureWorks].[Person].[Address]      ([AddressLine1]      ,[AddressLine2]      ,[City]      ,[StateProvinceId]      ,[PostalCode]      ,[rowguid]      ,[ModifiedDate] VALUES ('1313 Mockingbird Lane'…
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