14Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

Working the Door

PASS
You know those guys that work the door at clubs, seperating the wheat from the chaff, culling the herd, Choosing the Slain, sifting the gold from the dross, telling the difference between the sheep and the goats, winnowing out the weak, tipping the scales of justice... you know, the guys taking tickets. Well, this year, I get to do that job at the SQL Server Central party at the PASS Summit. That's right, I've been given absolute power, the keys to the kingdom, control of the list... you get the point. And best of all, while I was offered money, fame, power & women, I bargained for more and I got it. I'll be wearing one of those nifty Hawaiian shirts (Friday shirts) we always see Steve & Andy sporting. HA! And my wife won't…
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13Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Speaking at SNESSUG

Misc
I'll be presenting tonight at the Southern New England SQL Server Users Group (SNESSUG). The topic is "Using DMVs as a Shortcut to Query Tuning." It's a practice run for my spotlight session at the PASS Summit, so if you can't make it to the Summit, you should swing by Rhode Island.
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13Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit Birds of a Feather Lunch

PASS
The absolute biggest part of the PASS Summit is the one thing that most people don't take advantage of, networking. And no, I don't mean glad-handing everyone you meet, remembering all their names (although that is a good skill to have) and saying over & over again "Rush Chairman, damn glad to meet you." I mean taking advantage of the fact that you can talk to people that have already solved the problem that you're facing at work, or just might have some insight into that issue, or maybe you can give them insight into a problem they're facing. I'm mean, talking to people. Yeah, I know, we're all geeks, and worse than that, data geeks. That means we like to sit in dark little caves & grumble about our…
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12Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

SQL Saturday New England: The New Date

PASS
The real world can get in the way of important things like SQL Saturday. In the case of SQL Saturday New England, the original date was the same time as the Boston Marathon. Unfortunately, that means that Boston's somewhat limited hotel space will be tweaked. Rather than try to compete with that, we moved the date. Please mark it as April 2nd, 2011.
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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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27Sep 2010 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Parameter Name Size And Performance

SQL Server, T-SQL
I saw an odd statement the other day, "The size of the name of the parameter does not affect performance." My first thought was, "Well, duh!" But then, I had one of those, "Ah, but are you sure" thoughts. And you know what, I wasn't sure. If size of the parameter name did affect performance, I figured, the one sure place where that would be evident is in the size of the execution plan. Right? I mean, if there was an impact on memory, and hence on performance, that's probably where you'd see evidence of it. I wrote two queries: DECLARE @ThisIsAVeryVeryLongParameterNameThatIsTrulyRidiculousButItIllustratesThePointThatParameterLengthDoesNotAffectPerformance int SET @ThisIsAVeryVeryLongParameterNameThatIsTrulyRidiculousButItIllustratesThePointThatParameterLengthDoesNotAffectPerformance = 572 SELECT soh.SalesOrderID ,sod.SalesOrderDetailID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS soh JOIN Sales.SalesOrderDetail AS sod ON soh.SalesOrderID = sod.SalesOrderID WHERE soh.SalesOrderID = @ThisIsAVeryVeryLongParameterNameThatIsTrulyRidiculousButItIllustratesThePointThatParameterLengthDoesNotAffectPerformance DECLARE @v int SET…
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20Sep 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

SQL Saturday 46 (#sqlsat46) Recap

PASS
I was privileged to be able to attend and present at SQL Saturday 46 in Raleigh, NC, this last weekend. It was a great collection of people presenting some amazing stuff. I want to say, right off, I think this is the best SQL Saturday event I've been to. I say that despite the fact that I've helped put on a SQL Saturday. I also say that despite the fact that my sample size on SQL Saturday's is fairly low. I've only been to three (including the one I put on). You have to understand, the people who put on #sqlsat46, the Triangle SQL Server Users Group, did an absolutely outstanding job. They had clearly done the early work of getting sponsorships and organizing. This weekend, all that early work…
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07Sep 2010 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Links From Twitter

Misc
Normally, I try to stick to posting technical info or community stuff on the blog, but there were a couple of links from Twitter today that are too good not to share. First, an interesting take from Tom LaRock on the issue around the lack of quality DBA's. He suggests that it's actually a lack of quality managers. Go read it & comment there. Second, this is Not Safe For Work (NSFW). Please, please please understand that before you click on this link. It's a hilarious discussion about NoSql. Put on headphones & give it a listen. Back to your regularly scheduled blog posts...
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