A short post this week. While I was helping some friends recently, we experienced a curious thing where as soon as an application was started up, it was immediately followed by a denial-of-service attack that…
Today after fighting with designing a view that let me create a clustered index on it (indexed views — also known as materialized views — are awesome in the right context!), I kept running into the same…
(This post was updated on 1 August 2022.) A few months ago I suggested that the following settings should be the default for most SQL Server instances: Set cost threshold for parallelism to 50 Disable…
Here’s an interesting story for you this week. As part of the new Intelligent Query Processing improvements introduced in the upcoming SQL Server 2019, we find a new feature called scalar UDF inlining. This post…
(This post was updated on 5 February 2022.) A few months ago I suggested that the following settings should be the default for most SQL Server instances: Set cost threshold for parallelism to 50 Disable…
(This post was updated on 5 February 2022.) A few months ago I suggested that the following settings should be the default for most SQL Server instances: Set cost threshold for parallelism to 50 Disable…
(This post was updated on 5 February 2022.) A few months ago I suggested that the following settings should be the default for most SQL Server instances. Set cost threshold for parallelism to 50 Disable…
(This post was updated on 5 February 2022). A few months ago I suggested that the following settings should be the default for most SQL Server instances: Set cost threshold for parallelism to 50 Disable…
Last time we looked at the four major components of a computer system, and then looked at the SQL Server buffer pool as a way to leverage the best performance from computing hardware. Temperature Before…
My friend Michael J. Swart has a rule of thumb he calls Swart’s Ten Percent Rule. If you’re using over 10% of what SQL Server restricts you to, you’re doing it wrong. After a recent…
(This post was updated on 5 February 2022.) Tempting headline, isn’t it? It might even seem like clickbait, but that’s not the intention. The SQL Server default configuration is not recommended for production environments, and…
A shorter post this week, but an important one. Last week, Erik Darling commented on my post saying that we shouldn’t use SELECT *, which was both amusing and accurate. Amusing, because a number of…
Relational database management systems (RDBMS) like SQL Server and Azure SQL Database are very good at managing normalized data. Efficient storage and retrieval of data is the name of the game, so performance is a…
Last week I had the privilege of reviewing possibly the best SQL Server production environment I’ve seen in Canada. During the follow-up meeting, the senior DBA and I had a discussion about Virtual Log Files…
Nested views are bad. Let’s get that out of the way. What is a nested view anyway? Imagine that you have a SELECT statement you tend to use all over the place (a very common…