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Indexing

Eyes up here, kid

Free Webcast: Help! My SQL Server Maintenance is Taking Too Long!

January 26, 2021

Backup and Recovery, Company News, Index Maintenance, Production Database Administration

“Time for a smoke break.” You manage growing SQL Server databases with shrinking nightly maintenance windows. You just don’t have enough time left each night to do the necessary backups, corruption checking, index maintenance, and data jobs that your users and apps want to run. Cloud storage isn’t helping the problem, either. Stop playing Tetris…

Autoparameterized Trivial Queries May Not Get Partition Elimination

December 3, 2020

How’s that for a niche topic? You’re probably never going to know this, but since I had to figure it out the hard way, I’m writing this down so I don’t forget it: queries that get trivial optimization may not get partition elimination. This post is going to be a little on the long side…

When Do I Need to Use DESC in Indexes?

November 27, 2020

If I take the Users table from any Stack Overflow database, put an index on Reputation, and write a query to find the top 100 users sorted by reputation, descending: CREATE INDEX Reputation ON dbo.Users (Reputation); SELECT TOP 100 * FROM dbo.Users ORDER BY Reputation DESC; 12345 CREATE INDEX Reputation ON dbo.Users (Reputation); SELECT TOP 100…

Want to use columnstore indexes? Take the ColumnScore test.

October 1, 2020

Columnstore Indexes

When columnstore indexes first came out in SQL Server 2012, they didn’t get a lot of adoption. Adding a columnstore index made your entire table read-only. I often talk about how indexing is a tradeoff between fast reads and slow writes, but not a lot of folks can make their writes quite that slow. Thankfully, Microsoft…

Fundamentals of Columnstore

Announcing a New Class: Fundamentals of Columnstore

September 29, 2020

Columnstore Indexes

Your report queries are too slow. Will columnstore indexes help? You’ve tried throwing some hardware at it: your production SQL Server has 12 CPU cores or more, 128GB RAM, and SQL Server 2016 or newer. It’s still not enough to handle your growing data. It’s already up over 250GB, and they’re not letting you purge…

Unindexed Foreign Keys Can Make Performance Worse.

September 17, 2020

I know. You, dear reader, saw that title and you came in here because you’re furious. You want foreign key relationships configured in all of your tables to prevent bad data from getting in. But you gotta make sure to index them, too. Let’s take the Stack Overflow database – I’m using the 50GB Stack…

Free Webcast Wednesday: Pushing the Envelope with Indexing for Edge Case Performance

September 15, 2020

Most of the time, conventional clustered and non-clustered indexes work just fine – but not all the time. When you really need to push performance, hand-crafted special index types can give you an amazing boost. Join Microsoft Certified Master, Brent Ozar, to learn the right use cases for filtered indexes, indexed views, computed columns, table…

Mastering Index Tuning

SQLBits Attendees: Here Are Your Prerequisites for Mastering Index Tuning.

September 1, 2020

Howdy folks. It’s time for SQLBits! This year, I’m teaching a one-day Mastering Index Tuning workshop from 9AM-5PM London time, and you can join in online. Pricing is £300 for the one-day workshop, or £800 for a full conference pass. You can register here. Once you’re registered, here’s what you need to do: Watch my…

[Video] How to Think Like Clippy (Subtitle: Watch Brent Wear Another Costume)

July 27, 2020

Indexing, Videos

Remember Clippy, the Microsoft Office assistant from the late 1990s? He would pop up at the slightest provocation and offer to help you do something – usually completely unrelated to the task you were trying to accomplish. Sadly, the Office team told Clippy that he didn’t make the stack rankings cut, so he relocated over…

When a Columnstore Index Makes Your Query Fail

June 10, 2020

Columnstore Indexes

If you wanna count the number of rows in a table, I’ve usually said, “It doesn’t matter what you put inside the COUNT() – it can be COUNT(*), COUNT(Id), COUNT(1), or COUNT(‘Chocula’), or even COUNT(1/0) – it all works the same.” And that was true right up until I added a columnstore index. Start with…

SQL ConstantCare

SQL ConstantCare® Now Tells You Which Indexes to Drop.

May 26, 2020

Indexing, SQL ConstantCare

Indexes slow down data changes. SQL Server doesn’t have the concept of asynchronous indexes – copies of the data that it could update later when it’s bored. It has to keep every nonclustered index up to date, every single time you change data, like a delete/update/insert. Mo’ indexes, mo’ problems. That’s why in my Mastering…

No, You Can’t Calculate the Tipping Point with Simple Percentages.

May 7, 2020

This morning, Greg Gonzalez (who I respect) posted about visualizing the tipping point with Plan Explorer (a product I respect), and he wrote: The tipping point is the threshold at which a query plan will “tip” from seeking a non-covering nonclustered index to scanning the clustered index or heap. The basic formula is: A clustered…

Why Ordering Isn’t Guaranteed Without an ORDER BY

April 22, 2020

Indexing, T-SQL

If your query doesn’t have an ORDER BY clause, you can’t reliably predict the order of your results over time. Sure, it’s going to look predictable at first, but down the road, as things change – the indexes, the table, the server’s configuration, the size of your data – you can end up with some ugly…

[Video] What Percent Complete Is That Index Build?

March 26, 2020

Index Maintenance, SQL Server 2017, Videos

SQL Server 2017 & newer have a new DMV, sys.index_resumable_operations, that show you the percent_completion for index creations and rebuilds. It works, but…only if the data isn’t changing. But of course your data is changing – that’s the whole point of doing these operations as resumable. If they weren’t changing, we could just let the operations…

SQL ConstantCare

Things to Consider When SQL Server Asks for an Index

March 10, 2020

Indexing, SQL ConstantCare

One of the things I love about SQL Server is that during query plan compilation, it takes a moment to consider whether an index would help the query you’re running. Regular blog readers will know that I make a lot of jokes about the quality of these recommendations – they’re often incredibly bad – but…

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…

Building SQL ConstantCare: Let’s Tune an Index in Postgres.

January 20, 2020

Indexing, PostgreSQL

This week, our SQL ConstantCare® back end services started having some query timeout issues. Hey, we’re database people – we can do this, right? Granted, I work with Microsoft SQL Server most of the time, but we host our data in Amazon Aurora Postgres – is a query just a query and an index just…

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…

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