SQL Server

Extended Events have become one of my favorite tools for learning about tuning SQL Server. Whenever I wonder how something works, I can fire up a test instance and play around with XEvents. It’s always interesting, and at least 5% of the time I end up learning what I intended. Not everything is sunshine and rainbows. Finding…

Recently we got an email asking for help from a DBA who was concerned about a high percentage of the PREEMPTIVE_DEBUG wait on a SQL Server. They were investigating poor performance and had searched the internet high and low and not found information on what this wait means. They were stumped. What to Do When You Find an Unusual…

A question came up in our company chat room the other day: does the forced parameterization database setting help with plan cache bloat caused by dynamic comments or whitespace? I love the topic of parameterization in SQL Server, probably because it’s one of those things that’s really pretty weird (but seems like it’d be straightforward). So…

Index maintenance is confusing. Should you use maintenance plans or customized SQL Agent jobs? Join Kendra to learn the difference between index ‘rebuild’ and ‘reorganize’ commands, and how to avoid the pitfalls of maintenance plans in SQL Server. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nJKIeJC2lg Interested in trying out sp_BlitzTrace™ yourself? Download it in our free SQL Server download pack. You…

Every now and then I run across an automated script that does something a little suspicious. I’m not saying you should never put these things into a script, but if you do, seriously think about the surprise gotchas when someone runs the script: DBCC commands other than CHECKDB sp_configure (and especially RECONFIGURE afterwards) ALTER SERVER CONFIGURATION…

As a developer, one of the things I can no longer live without is a date table. Who wants to type DATENAME and DATEPART over and over again? Not this guy, and once you have a date table, you won’t want to either. In this 16-minute video, I’ll give you four reasons why you should…

In this video, Doug talks about how changing a column’s data type in SQL Server can be dangerous when there are Access clients using it, and a reference table to help avoid type mismatches when planning data type changes. Click here to see the list of SQL Server data types according to Access. https://youtu.be/vSBnnpcxvjc  

“Should a query get to use more than one CPU core?” That’s an important question for your SQL Server. If you’re not sure what parallelism is, get started by exploring the mysteries of CXPACKET with Brent. He’ll introduce you to the the setting, ‘Cost Threshold for Parallelism’. Let’s test Cost Threshold for Parallelism I generate an estimated…