In my work with clients and classes, some blog posts come up a LOT.
Forcing a Parallel Query Execution Plan by Paul White – Paul’s posts usually cover execution plan components in incredible detail, but the real gem in this one is the section called “Parallelism-Inhibiting Components.” If your T-SQL includes this stuff, the whole plan or a zone of it will go single-threaded.
Use Caution with SQL Server’s MERGE Statement by Aaron Bertrand – Whenever someone’s question starts with, “I’m using MERGE to…”, I immediately open this page and show them the list of known problems with MERGE. Their response is, “Oh my God, you mean these are really known bugs? What should I use instead of MERGE?” We have a discussion about rolling your own upsert. MERGE needs a 12-step recovery program.
Take Care When Scripting Batches by Michael J. Swart – When you need to affect a lot of rows – like a big delete or update – and you need to do it repeatedly over time, batching can help. If you really want the most performance, you need to run scientific experiments like Swart does in his post:
Serverless Architectures by Mike Roberts – Also known as Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), serverless is a new way of application development and deployment. This post is a monster, but just read the first section, “What is Serverless?” and stop at the “Benefits” section. Knowing just that part will help you have better conversations with architects and developers.
Juggling Writing AND a Job? Figure It the %$&* Out by Chad Gervich – This one’s professional development, not tech, but it comes up a lot. It’s for people with day jobs who want to become screenwriters, but the exact same advice holds true for aspiring bloggers. It doesn’t matter if you want to build something – we all wanna build stuff. You also have to have the spare time, or make it by making sacrifices in other parts of your life.
Slow in the Application, Fast in SSMS by Erland Sommarskog – Listeners of our Office Hours podcast probably feel like this one comes up every single week.
Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule – if you want an employee to finish hard tasks, block out their calendar so they don’t have to context switch.
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I occasionally get something right. 🙂
Thanks for the other links, I was only familiar with some of them!
I feel like 34.7% of the value I bring to the table is comprised of referring people to some of these links.
I was just pointing a company to your table migration posts today, and they said, “How do you have a link for everything?”
Well, uh, there’s only about a dozen links I keep using, it’s just that…those problems are really common, and they’re hard to find great information on!