I hate DBCC Commands

Not what they do, just that the syntax isn’t consistent (do I need quotes around this string or not?), the results are a distraction to get into a usable table, and you need to write absurd loops to perform object-at-a-time data gathering. I’m not talking about running DBCC CHECKDB (necessarily), or turning on Trace Flags, or any cache-clearing commands — you know, things that perform actions — I mean things that spit tabular results at you.

Stuff like this puts the BC in DBCC. It’s a dinosaur.

In SQL Server 2016

DBCC INPUTBUFFER got its own DMV after, like, a million decades. Commands like DBCC SQLPERF, DBCC DBINFO, and DBCC LOGINFO should probably get their own. Pinal Dave has a whole list of DBCC Commands that you can break your server with here.

But truly, the most annoying one to me is DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS. It’s insane that there’s no DMV or function to expose histogram information. That’s why I filed this Connect item.

UPDATE: It looks like Greg Low beat me to it by about 6 years. Too bad searching Connect items is so horrible. I urge you to vote for Greg’s item, instead.

Statistics are the intel SQL Server uses to make query plan choices.

Making this information easier to retrieve, aggregate, join to other information, and analyze would put a powerful performance tuning tool into the hands of SQL Server users, and it would help take some of the mystery surrounding statistics away.

Please consider voting for my Greg’s Connect item.

Thanks for reading!