I presented a session at the SQL Saturday event in Oklahoma City last weekend. The event itself was pretty good. The organizers put everything together pretty well and the venue was quite nice. Plus, since I grew up in Oklahoma (Tulsa), it was a chance to go home. The event was good, but my presentation went a little downhill. The name of the session is "Top Tips for Better Stored Procedure Performance." I should rename it to just say "T-SQL Query Performance" because it's not focused on stored procedures, but on queries. The presentation is 1/3 talking about how you write your queries, naming syntax, formatting, etc. The second 2/3 is all about common mistakes made in writing T-SQL such as using NO_LOCK everywhere, nesting views, joining and nesting multi-statement…
And we’re off. We opened with a video of people saying “Connect, Share, Learn†and “This, is Community†Rob Farley & Buck Woody came out with a song about long running queries. [8:20]Wayne Snyder has been working with the PASS organization since 1999. He spoke at the first PASS Summit and he’s been on the board forever. He has finally hit the point as immediate-past president where he has to leave the board. We’ve got a great little thank you for him from all sorts of people. Wayne is a magnificent guy, seriously. If you see him, thank him for his service. [8:28]We have a new executive committee, Bill Graziano as President, WHOOP, Douglas McDowell is Executive Vice-President and Thomas LaRock is VP of Marketing and finally, Rushabh Mehta is…
I’ve put in several abstracts for the 2011 Summit. This year we’re voting for preferred sessions. If you’re interested in any of the ones I’ve listed below, please consider giving me a vote.I was very kindly invited to submit for a spotlight session (for which I am very grateful and humbled, again) so I put two in for that. I also put in for two regular sessions. This year, for the first time I put in not one, but two abstracts for all day pre/post-conference sessions. One of them was put together as a partnership between Gail Shaw (blog|twitter) and myself. I’m excited by that one. I love speaking and I really hope I make the cut. In the interest of sharing, these are the abstracts I’ve submitted: Spotlight: DMOs…
Greetings. Welcome once more to the Miskatonic University branch of SQL University. Does anyone know where to buy some camping equipment, cheap? I’ve been tagged to go an expedition to Antarctica and I need some cold weather gear a bit more substantial than my LL Bean boots. Evidently the last expedition found some caves in some mountains down there. Sounds like the perfect place to get away from all the crazy stuff that goes on here at Miskatonic. I mean, what could happen? Anyway, our last several talks have all been about indexes and indexing. One of the things that we haven’t talked about is how to tell if, how or when your indexes are being used. Starting with SQL Server 2005, and continuing to 2008 and R2, there has…
Welcome, SQL University Students to another extension class here at Miskatonic University, home to the Fighting Cephalopods (GO PODS!). Never mind the stains on the floor, or the walls…or those really nasty ones on the ceiling. There was a… oh what did the dean call it… an incident last week when one of the students had a little accident after reading Die Vermiss Mysteriis one too many times. But we’re not here to talk about arcane tomes and unspeakable horrors today. No, today we’re here to talk about clustered indexes. SQL Server storage is really predicated around the idea of clustered indexes. Don’t believe me? Let’s list a few places that require a clustered index: Partitioning. A table in SQL Azure In order to create XML indexes What about the…
Today is Dr. Dewitt. The ballroom, where the keynotes are held, is filled with extra chairs. The Summit organizers expect extra attendance today, and well they should. Dr. Dewitt was amazing last year. I suspect this year will be more of the same. Rick Heiges is introducing the day (waiting for Dr. Dewitt). Lynda Rab is leaving the board. Sad. I started volunteering for the PASS organization working for Lynda. She's great. The new board members are Douglas McDowell, Andy Warren and Allen Kinsel. The spring SQL Rally event was announced. I'll be presenting a full day session on query performance, Query Performance Tuning, Start to Finish. Look for (a lot) more blog posts on this. The Summit next year has been moved to mid-October. WHOOP! This is great because…
 Quote: "Database stuff, all this programming stuff, is easy. Anyone can do it. That's why everyone in the company has sa privileges." For nine months, I worked in an environment where everyone, from developers to QA to the sales people to the receptionist, had SA privileges. You know what? DBA skills are necessary. I speak from the point of view of someone that has had to recover a server after a salse person helpfully "cleaned up the temporary stuff on the server" by dropping tempdb, causing a late deployment for a client. I speak from the point of view of the guy who kept a window open on his desk with the database restore script ready to run, all day long, because of "accidents" that stopped development until I could get the…
Nice to see most of you have managed to fight your way through the shoggoths outside to attend another lecture at the Miskatonic branch of SQL University. This will be the third and final part of the introduction to indexes lecture. Please, if you're going mad, step out into the hall. Our previous two lectures introduced the concept of indexes and then talked about two types of indexes, clustered and nonclustered. This lecture will cover the concept of statistics as they relate to indexes. If you followed the previous lecture then you know that indexes are stored in a Balanced Tree or B-Tree structure. You know that this storage mechanism is intended to provide fast retrieval of data. But, how can the query engine inside SQL Server know which index…
I'm continuing to evaluate Confio's Ignite database monitoring tool. I've had it collecting data on a couple of production servers for about a week now. Based on what I've seen so far, it's looking like a pretty good piece of software. Breaking with the usual tradition, I'm going to talk about the things I'm not crazy about with the software, before I start singing its praises. The first thing, that I thought was missing, but is actually just hard to find, is the ability to look at the query information that Ignite collects, broken down by database. It looks like you should be able to get to it by looking at the Databases tab, but instead you have to first drill down into a time-period, then select specific databases within that time period,…
No, I'm not talking about a Dickens novel. I'm talking about the number of characters in a string. I had a painful time recently because of the word "characters."Â If you take a look at the dynamic management view sys.dm_exec_sql_text you can get the queries that have been run on your system that are still in the cache. It's a great utility. Better still, you can get specific statements from the code that are actively running through sys.dm_exec_requests or ones that have run through sys.dm_exec_query_stats. To do this is very simple. Each of these DMV's has a pair of columns, statement_start_offset and statement_end_offset. These columns, and I'm quoting directly from books online measure the "number of character" offset from the beginning of the SQL string and from the end of…