Development

4 Things I Love About Integers #TSQL2sday

Development
4 Comments
I love integers. Furthermore, I think we’ve all been taking them for granted. Integers are clean, elegant datatypes that do exactly what they’re supposed to. They’re the Golden Retrievers of the database world: they have a few shortcomings, but so, so few. And so for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, I wanna share my love for…
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“But Surely NOLOCK Is Okay If No One’s Changing Data, Right?”

Some of y’all, bless your hearts, are really, really, really in love with NOLOCK. I’ve shown you how you get incorrect results when someone’s updating the rows, and I’ve shown how you get wrong-o results when someone’s updating unrelated rows. It doesn’t matter – there’s always one of you out there who believes NOLOCK is okay…
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How to Batch Updates A Few Thousand Rows at a Time

T-SQL
17 Comments
You’ve got a staging table with millions of rows, and you want to join that over to a production table and update the contents. However, when you try to do it all in one big statement, you end up with lock escalation, large transaction log usage, slow replication to Availability Groups, and angry users with…
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When You’re Troubleshooting Blocking, Look at Query #2, Too.

When I’m troubleshooting a blocking emergency, the culprit is usually the query at the head of a blocking chain. Somebody did something ill-advised like starting a transaction and then locking a whole bunch of tables. But sometimes, the lead blocker isn’t the real problem. It’s query #2. Here’s a sample scenario: A long-running select with…
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How Scalar User-Defined Functions Slow Down Queries

T-SQL
8 Comments
When your query has a scalar user-defined function in it, SQL Server may not parallelize it and may hide the work that it’s doing in your execution plan. To show it, I’ll run a simple query against the Users table in the Stack Overflow database. SELECT TOP 100 DisplayName, Location, Reputation, Id FROM dbo.Users ORDER…
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Why Full Text’s CONTAINS Queries Are So Slow

T-SQL
20 Comments
SQL Server’s full text search is amazing. Well, it amazes me at least – it has so many cool capabilities: looking for prefixes, words near each other, different verb tenses, and even thesaurus searches. However, that’s not how I see most people using it: I’ve seen so many shops using it for matching specific strings,…
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Using Triggers to Replace Scalar UDFs on Computed Columns

T-SQL
46 Comments
Your database is riddled with computed columns whose definition includes a scalar user-defined function. Even up to & including SQL Server 2019, which boasts faster scalar function processing, any table that includes a scalar function cause all access to that table to go single-threaded. In that case, a trigger can actually be a great replacement.…
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