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CXCONSUMER Is Harmless? Not So Fast, Tiger.
In Theory Let’s say you’ve got a query, and the point of that query is to take your largest customer/user/whatever and compare their activity to smaller whatevers. You may also stumble upon this issue...
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Does your backup strategy achieve RPO and RTO goals of the business?
When deciding on a backup strategy for a database, there are various things we must consider: Does this database need point-in-time recovery? What are the RPO (data loss) and RTO (downtime) goals? No...
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Do I Have A Query Problem Or An Index Problem?
Party Up When someone says “this query is slow”, and you can rule out contextual stuff like blocking, odd server load, or just an underpowered server, what’s the first thing you look at? There’s a lot...
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[Video] “Actual” Execution Plans Lie for Branching Queries
In which I show why you can’t trust “actual” execution plans for branching stored procedures, and you’re better off using sp_BlitzCache to figure out what branches you need to tune: Demo code:CREATE...
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[Video] Office Hours 2018/7/25 (With Transcriptions)
This week, Erik and Richie discuss whether it’s relevant to specify data in logs in SQL cloud environment, licensing, using canary tables on Availability Groups, how Entity Framework limits tuning,...
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Common Entity Framework Problems: N + 1
I wanna dance with common problems One of the most common issues that I’ve seen with Entity Framework isn’t technically an Entity Framework problem at all. The N + 1 problem is an anti-pattern that is...
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New Classes: Dashboard in a Day, Database DevOps, tSQLt, SQL Server...
We’ve got a few new goodies, and they’re 50% off for a limited time! Dashboard in a Day – A hands-on workshop using Power BI to rapidly produce great looking interactive reports and dashboards. Your...
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A Query That Should Be Contradicted
Innocent Enough I was writing another query, and became enamored with the fact that HAVING will accept IS NULL or IS NOT NULL as a predicate. What I ended up writing as an example was this query:SELECT...
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How I Configure SQL Server Management Studio
Ever go into Tools-Options? SSMS has a stunning number of options these days. Here are some of my favorites: Documents options On the Documents options, I uncheck “Check for consistent line endings on...
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Wait Stats Should Be Easy By Now
Why Is My Query… We’ve all started a question with a close approximation of those words. No matter how you finish that sentence, there’s some basic information that you need to collect to figure it...
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How to Check Performance on a New SQL Server
So you just built a brand new SQL Server, and before you go live, you wanna check to see if it’s going to perform as well as your existing server. The easy way: test your maintenance jobs I’m just...
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[Video] Office Hours 2018/8/1 (With Transcriptions)
This week, Erik and Richie discuss monitoring tools, finding all unused tables across databases, query tuning, deleting vs hanging on to indexes, sharding databases, query editors, aggressively-locked...
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Two Important Differences Between SQL Server and PostgreSQL
SQL ConstantCare® uses PostgreSQL as a back end – specifically, AWS RDS Aurora – so I’ve spent a lot of time writing Postgres queries lately. Here are some of the things I’ve noticed that are...
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A Visual Guide to Choosing an Index Type
Warning: I’m about to overly simplify a whole lot of topics to make things easy. Armchair architects, warm up your flamethrowers. Your table has rows and columns kinda like a spreadsheet: In most...
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Why Does My Select Query Have An Assert?
You And Ert This is a quick post because it came up with a client. I like having stuff to point people to — that’s sort of like automation, right? Anyway! Lots of plans have Assert operators in them....
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How to Check for Non-Existence of Rows
You’re writing a query, and you wanna check to see if rows exist in a table. I’m using the free Stack Overflow database, and I wanna find all of the users who have not left a comment. The tables...
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The First 3 Things I Look At on a SQL Server
1. Are backups and CHECKDB being done? Before I step out on the wire, I want to know if there’s a safety net. If there’s a recoverability risk, I don’t stop here – I keep looking because the rest of...
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First Responder Kit Release: A Year From Now These Will All Stop Working On...
You think I’m kidding. Time bomb. Boom. Get your upgrade underwear on. You can download the updated FirstResponderKit.zip here. sp_Blitz Improvements #1664 – We’re officially smart enough to not warn...
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[Video] Office Hours 2018/8/8 (With Transcriptions)
This week, Brent, Tara, Erik, and Richie discuss troubleshooting port blocking, page life expectancy issues, problems with turning off CPU schedulers, coordinating two jobs across servers, adding...
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Setting Up SQL Server: People Still Need Help
I Like What’s Happening I wanna start off by saying that I like what Microsoft has been doing with the setup process — it made a lot of sense to add the tempdb configuration screen, and having a...
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