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Development

How to Track Performance of Queries That Use RECOMPILE Hints

March 12, 2020

Query Store (QDS), sp_BlitzCache

Say we have a stored procedure that has two queries in it – the second query uses a recompile hint, and you might recognize it from my parameter sniffing session: Transact-SQL CREATE OR ALTER PROC dbo.usp_SearchUsers @Reputation INT AS BEGIN /* Query 1, always the same: */ SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.Users; /* Query 2, recompiles…

Making TRY_CAST and TRY_CONVERT Queries Faster with Indexed Computed Columns

March 5, 2020

Computed columns, Execution Plans, T-SQL

I know this is gonna sound crazy, but let’s say you had a table where people stored all kinds of things in one column: dates, integers, file names, sale prices, file names, you name it. And let’s say your application frequently ran a query looking for dates in that column, like this: Transact-SQL SELECT *…

WHERE GETDATE() BETWEEN StartDate AND COALESCE(CancelDate, EndDate) Is Even Harder to Tune.

February 19, 2020

Development, Indexing

In my last post, we started with a memberships table, and each membership had start & end dates. I’m going to create the table and populate it with everyone having an active membership – their StartDate is the same as their Stack Overflow account creation date, and their EndDate is around a year or two…

WHERE GETDATE() BETWEEN StartDate AND EndDate Is Hard to Tune.

February 18, 2020

Development, Indexing

Say you’ve got a memberships (or policies) table, and each membership has start & end dates: Transact-SQL USE StackOverflow; GO DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.UsersMemberships; CREATE TABLE dbo.UsersMemberships (Id INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED, UserId INT NOT NULL, StartDate DATETIME NOT NULL, EndDate DATETIME NOT NULL, CancelledEarlyDate DATETIME NULL); GO 1234567891011 USE StackOverflow;GODROP TABLE IF…

How to Pass a List of Values Into a Stored Procedure

February 13, 2020

Say we have a stored procedure that queries the Stack Overflow Users table to find people in a given location. Here’s what the table looks like: And here’s what my starting stored procedure looks like: Transact-SQL CREATE OR ALTER PROC dbo.usp_SearchUsersByLocation @SearchLocation NVARCHAR(40) AS SELECT * FROM dbo.Users WHERE Location = @SearchLocation ORDER BY DisplayName;…

What Are Soft Deletes, and How Are They Implemented?

February 4, 2020

Normally when you run a DELETE statement in a database, the data’s gone. With the soft delete design pattern, you add a bit column like IsDeleted, IsActive, or IsArchived to the table, and instead of deleting rows, you flip the bit column. This can buy you a few advantages: Easier/faster undeletes History tracking (keeping deleted…

[Video] Watch Brent Tune Queries

February 3, 2020

Execution Plans, Videos

Ever wonder somebody else does it? Watch over my shoulder as I spend 9 minutes in PowerPoint explaining the big picture, and then about 40 minutes working on this stored procedure in the StackOverflow2013 database: If you enjoy that, the Watch Brent Tune Queries page has another video and other query examples. Enjoy!

How to Remove Times from Dates in SQL Server

January 29, 2020

Say that you’ve got a table with a datetime column in it, like the LastAccessDate column in the Stack Overflow Users table: And let’s say you wanna find the users who last accessed the site on September 9, 2018 – regardless of the time. Here are a few ways to do it: Transact-SQL SELECT *…

Cool Query Hints

January 23, 2020

The SQL Server documentation has a pretty cool list of query hints: Yeah, I surf in dark mode. I’m a dark kinda guy. But wait – what’s that colored box? ENHANCE! I could make jokes here, but … every single thing in that caution is true. SQL Server really does typically select the best execution…

Brent Reading Book

Where Should You Tune Queries: Production, Staging, or Development?

January 22, 2020

Execution Plans

The #1 fastest way to tune queries is in the production database, on the production server. I know. Put the knife down. You’re not happy about that, but hear me out: I’m specifically talking about the fastest way to tune queries. In production, you can guarantee that you’re looking at the same data, hosted on the…

Can SELECT * Make a Query Go…Faster?!?

January 14, 2020

Execution Plans

Most of the time, you’ll hear advice that you should select as few columns as possible so that SQL Server can do less work. However, one of my clients hit a neat edge case scenario where SELECT * queries actually ran faster than picking a subset of columns. I can’t share the exact query, but I…

[Video] You shouldn’t dynamically create/alter/drop triggers.

January 7, 2020

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: this isn’t about the relative good or evil of triggers. I kinda like triggers, in fact – they’re good for enforcing business logic in a hurry when you can’t redo code across an entire application. Sure, in a perfect world, we’d always have the code do…

How to Make SELECT COUNT(*) Queries Crazy Fast

December 26, 2019

Columnstore Indexes, Execution Plans

When you run a SELECT COUNT(*), the speed of the results depends a lot on the structure & settings of the database. Let’s do an exploration of the Votes table in the Stack Overflow database, specifically the 2018-06 ~300GB version where the Votes table has 150,784,380 rows taking up ~5.3GB of space. I’m going to measure…

The Two Ways to Fix Non-Sargable Queries

December 18, 2019

Execution Plans

In the database world, when we say something isn’t sargable, what we mean is that SQL Server is having a tough time with your Search ARGuments. What a sargable query looks like In a perfect world, when you search for something, SQL Server can do an index seek to jump directly to the data you…

How to Think Like the Engine: When a Seek Isn’t

November 21, 2019

Execution Plans, How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine, Indexing

In our last episode, I introduced the concept of scan predicates: execution plan operations that weren’t able to seek directly to the rows they needed. Let’s take another query: Transact-SQL DropIndexes; GO CREATE INDEX IX_LastAccessDate_Id_DisplayName_Age ON dbo.Users(LastAccessDate, Id, DisplayName, Age); GO SELECT Id FROM dbo.Users WHERE LastAccessDate > '1800/01/01' AND DisplayName = N'Brent Ozar'; GO…

How to Think Like the Engine: Index Column Order Matters a LOT.

November 20, 2019

Execution Plans, How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine, Indexing

We’ve been working with the clustered index of the Users table, which is on the Identity column – starts at 1 and goes up to a bajillion: And in a recent episode, we added a wider nonclustered index on LastAccessDate, Id, DisplayName, and Age: Transact-SQL CREATE INDEX IX_LastAccessDate_Id_DisplayName_Age ON dbo.Users(LastAccessDate, Id, DisplayName, Age); GO 123…

How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine: When Statistics Don’t Help

November 5, 2019

How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine, Statistics

In our last episode, we saw how SQL Server estimates row count using statistics. Let’s write two slightly different versions of our query – this time, only looking for a single day’s worth of users – and see how its estimations go: Transact-SQL SELECT LastAccessDate, Id, DisplayName, Age FROM dbo.Users WHERE LastAccessDate BETWEEN '2018-08-27' AND…

How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine: Using Statistics to Build Query Plans

November 4, 2019

How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine, Statistics

In our last episode, SQL Server was picking between index seeks and table scans, dancing along the tipping point to figure out which one would be more efficient for a query. One of my favorite things about SQL Server is the sheer number of things it has to consider when building a query plan. It…

How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine: What’s the Tipping Point?

October 23, 2019

Execution Plans, How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine

In our last episode, I’d expanded our query to include DisplayName and Age – two columns that weren’t in our nonclustered index: Transact-SQL SELECT LastAccessDate, Id, DisplayName, Age FROM dbo.Users WHERE LastAccessDate > '2018-09-02 04:00' ORDER BY LastAccessDate; 1234 SELECT LastAccessDate, Id, DisplayName, Age FROM dbo.Users WHERE LastAccessDate > '2018-09-02 04:00' ORDER BY LastAccessDate; So as a result,…

How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine: So Index Seeks are Great, Right?

October 21, 2019

Execution Plans, How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine

In our last episode, we added a nonclustered index, and now even though this query has a filter and an ORDER BY, it hardly did any work at all – just a lightweight index seek: Ah, index seeks – nothing better than that, right? Well, not exactly. Let’s make one tweak to the WHERE clause…

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