Posts by Erik Darling

You can do a lot with Extended Events I’m really looking forward to the stuff in 2016 becoming mainstream in 2020 or so. Raise your hand if you’re using SQL Server 2014 in production. Raise your hand if your vendor supports SQL Server 2014. Okay then. When you open up the New Session dialog to…

Sometimes SQL is the presentation layer And when it is, you end up doing a lot of concatenating. This isn’t about performance, or trying to talk you out of SQL as the presentation layer, this is just something you should keep in mind. SQL is a confusing language when you’re just starting out. Heck, sometimes…

Sometimes great things stare you in the face for years Sometimes they stare at you for so long that you stop noticing them. This isn’t a romdramadey tag line. There are just so many buttons to push. Sometimes pressing them is a horrible idea and it breaks everything. I lose my mind every time I…

These things used to confuse me so much Despite having worked at a Market Research company for a while, I know nothing about statistics, other than that project managers have all sorts of disagreeably subjective phrases for describing them. Vast majority, convincing plurality, dwindling minority, et al. Less talky, more picture. When I started getting…

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…

Every single time Really. Every single time. It started off kind of funny. Scalar functions in queries: no parallelism. Scalar functions in computed columns: no parallelism, even if you’re not selecting the computed column. Every time I think of a place where someone could stick a scalar function into some SQL, it ends up killing…

This isn’t about performance If you’re interested in performance tests, you can get in the way back machine and read a couple posts by Adam Machanic here and here. I’m also not talking about the difference between them. There are a million articles about that. They’re obviously different, but how does SQL handle that internally?…

What a gem! Minimal logging is super cool. If you follow all the rules, there’s a pretty good chance it will work! Unfortunately, it’s not always up to you. All sorts of ISVs put out all sorts of bad ideas in form of code. Sort of like in Ghostbusters, when Gozer tells the crew to…

SQL Server 2016 is adding some really awesome stuff Not the least of which is a ton of super cool information in execution plans, and an Extended Events session to expose the same information for all queries. The details are detailed in detail over on this blog post from MS. For those of you with…