Execution Plans

Hey, That’s Not My Sort!

May 3, 2018

Execution Plans, Indexing

Understand Your Plan Mr. Optimizer does the rock n roll hoochie koo with Mrs. Optimizer, c. 1953. When reading query plans, you may sometimes see a sort when you didn’t explicitly ask for data to be sorted. Sometimes they show up to support order-preserving operators like stream aggregates, merge joins, or segments. Other times, they…

Concurrency Week: How Entity Framework and NHibernate Can Cause Poison RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE Waits

April 25, 2018

Development, Memory Grants

I’ve already blogged about my dislike for ORMs from a production DBA performance tuning standpoint only. I get that they’re useful to developers. I get it. But I’m focused on performance. A quick recap of what I don’t like about ORMs from that other blog post: Implicit conversions due to nvarchar variables vs varchar columns…

Index Key Column Order And Supporting Sorts

April 18, 2018

Execution Plans, Indexing

Whatever Man When tuning queries that need to sort large amounts of data, sometimes it makes sense to stick the ordering elements as the leading key column(s) in your index. This allows SQL Server to easily sort your data by that column, and then access other key and included columns to satisfy other parts of…

Parking Garages And Predicates

April 17, 2018

Execution Plans, Indexing, SQL Server

Hotels on Wheels Parking garages and predicates have a “lot” in common. GET IT? No no but seriously. They do. If you’ve ever lost your ticket, forgotten where you’ve parked, or just driven around hopelessly waiting to see an empty spot, you probably wish there were a better way to do things. Transact-SQL CREATE TABLE…

The Many Mysteries of Merge Joins

April 4, 2018

Execution Plans, Indexing

Not A Single Picture Of A Zipper Image humbly borrowed from https://70srichard.wordpress.com/2014/12/17/beverly-hills-cop/ There are some interesting things about Merge Joins, and Merge Join plans that I figured I’d blog about. Merge joins have at least one interesting attribute, and may add some weird stuff to your query plans. It’s not that I think they’re bad,…

Hash Join Memory Grant Factors

March 29, 2018

Execution Plans, Memory Grants

Buskets Much like Sorts, Hash Joins require some amount of memory to operate efficiently — without spilling, or spilling too much. And to a similar degree, the number of rows and columns passed to the Hashing operator matter where the memory grant is concerned. This doesn’t mean Hashing is bad, but you may need to…

Table Valued Parameters: Unexpected Parameter Sniffing

March 23, 2018

Execution Plans

Like Table Variables, Kinda Jeremiah wrote about them a few years ago. I always get asked about them while poking fun at Table Variables, so I thought I’d provide some detail and a post to point people to. There are some interesting differences between them, namely around how cardinality is estimated in different situations. Table…

SQL Server 2017 CU5: Finding Problems With Parallelism

March 22, 2018

Execution Plans, SQL Server 2017

Snow Is Temporary Cumulative Update 5 dropped for SQL Server 2017. Hooray. Poor Taryn. Nooooooooo, I just patched! — Taryn (@onlybluefeet) March 20, 2018 These new servicing models sure do make me glad I don’t have a real job. I’m also happy because I get to write weird queries to test interesting new functionality. This SQL…

Why Multiple Plans for One Query Are Bad

March 21, 2018

Development, Execution Plans

I’m going to demo this using the Stack Overflow public database. We’ll use the Users table – which has exactly what you think it has, everyone who’s asked/answered/commented at StackOverflow.com. I need to search for people by their DisplayName, so I’ve created an index on that: Transact-SQL CREATE INDEX IX_DisplayName ON dbo.Users(DisplayName); 1 CREATE INDEX…

If You Can’t Index It, It’s Probably Not SARGable

March 20, 2018

Execution Plans, Indexing

Thumbs Rule OK? When writing queries, it’s really common to want to take shortcuts to express some logic. I know, it “works fine”, and the results are “right”, and you have “more important” things to do. But take a minute here for future you. Just think of reading this post as a continuation of the…

Why sp_prepare Isn’t as “Good” as sp_executesql for Performance

March 15, 2018

Execution Plans

sp_prepare For Mediocre You may remember me from movies like Optimize for… Mediocre? and Why You’re Tuning Stored Procedures Wrong (the Problem with Local Variables)! Great posts, Kendra! Following the same theme, we found this issue while looking at queries issued from JDBC. Specifically, the prepared statement class seems to cause queries to hit the density vector…

I Most Certainly Do Have A Join Predicate

March 9, 2018

Execution Plans

FREAK OUT You wrote a query. You joined tables. You have the right ON clause. You have the right WHERE clause. But the query plan has a problem! BugBurg How Could This Happen To Me? Oh, relax. You’re not crazy. You just assumed the worst. Like me whenever I feel pain near my liver. Call…

Troubleshooting Parameter Sniffing Issues the Right Way: Part 2

March 7, 2018

Execution Plans

In part 1 of this series, I showed you how to get the compiled parameter values for an execution plan that you are investigating. You’ve identified it as a bad execution plan. You’ve already fixed the production emergency by removing the bad plan from the plan cache. You’re almost ready to start testing for a…

Troubleshooting Parameter Sniffing Issues the Right Way: Part 1

March 6, 2018

Execution Plans

Many of you are troubleshooting Parameter Sniffing issues the wrong way in production. In this three-part series, I’ll show you how to troubleshoot it the right way: Getting the Compiled Parameter Values Getting the App’s SET Options Avoiding the Density Vector This is part 1 in the series. Parameter Sniffing 101 When a query suddenly…

Of Windowing Functions And Where Clauses

March 2, 2018

Execution Plans, SQL Server

Seen One, Seen’em All This isn’t about indexing! I promise. In fact, I’ve dropped all my indexes for this. It’s just that, well, I’ve seen this happen with two clients in a row, so maybe it’s time to blog about it. If you run this query, you get a fairly obvious plan. Transact-SQL WITH nonsense…

Joe Sack query bucks

Adaptive Joins, Memory Grant Feedback, and Stored Procedures

February 28, 2018

Adaptive Joins, Execution Plans, Memory Grants

Not Exactly The Catchiest Name There’s a TL;DR here, in case you don’t feel like reading the whole darn thing. Batch mode memory grant feedback works with stored procedures It takes several runs to adjust upwards to a final number It seems to only adjust downwards once (in this case by about 40%) This isn’t…

Computed Columns and Cardinality Estimates

February 23, 2018

Development, Execution Plans, SQL Server

:thinking_face: When most people think about computed columns, they don’t think about cardinality estimates. Heck, I’m not sure most people think about cardinality estimates. At all. Ever. One of the few people who has ever responded to my emails does, and I didn’t even have to threaten him. Do you think about computed columns? If…

Then Why Doesn’t SQL Always Seek?

February 16, 2018

Execution Plans, Indexing, SQL Server

Scan The Man There seems to be a perpetual battle waged against the Index Scan. At some point it was declared that scans were inferior to seeks, and all energy should be dedicated to eradicating them. Much like asking why the whole plane isn’t made out of the stuff the black box is made out…

Memory Grants: SQL Server’s Other Public Toilet

February 15, 2018

Execution Plans, Indexing, Memory Grants

Sharing Is Caring When everything is going well, and queries are behaving responsibly, one need hardly think about memory grants. The problem becomes itself when queries start to over and under estimate their practical needs. Second Hand Emotion Queries ask for memory to do stuff. Memory is a shared resource. What kind of stuff? Well, usually…

Functions and “the use of indexes”

February 1, 2018

Execution Plans, Indexing, SQL Server

Wordy Bird This sentence gets repeated a lot. You know the one. “Functions prevent the use of indexes.” Well, knowing you, it’s probably just your indexes. I’ve seen your indexes. Which Indexes? In the SUPERUSER database (yeah, I know, I’m cheating on Stack Overflow), all the tables have a PK/CX on an Id column, which is…

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