Search Results for &#8220;scalar functions&#8221;

Blitz Result: User-Defined Functions Good development practices dictate building reusable code, and user-defined functions seem like a good way to promote code reuse. Unfortunately, it turns out that SQL Server doesn’t perform well with most scalar user-defined functions. This part of our SQL Server sp_Blitz script checks the plan cache looking for resource-intensive queries that…

Office Hours Speed Round, Text Edition

Last Updated June 12, 2022

Production Database Administration

Not all of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are hard – some of ’em can be answered in just a line or two: Q: Hany: Hello Brent, Who’s “Brent Ozar” in the Azure world? Microsoft, and I wrote why here. Q: Neutron Jack: Do you see any concerning TSQL deprecations in SQL 2022? No, neither…

Your Ten Favorite Blog Posts from 2020

Last Updated December 31, 2020

Company News

The most popular posts this year were when I ran my Fundamentals classes for free throughout the year. I ran a different class per month, and posted signups and videos here on the blog. I’m setting those aside, though, because they’re not evergreen: they’ve since disappeared since I only ran ’em free for a limited…

Finding the One Query to Tune in a Multi-Query Batch

Last Updated November 30, 2020

Execution Plans

When you have a stored procedure or application query that has multiple queries inside of it, how can you tell which query to focus on? For starters, do NOT believe the percentages you see in execution plans. Let’s take a classic performance tuning issue: scalar functions. I’ll start with the Stack Overflow database – if…

What SQL ConstantCare® Has Been Finding In Your Servers Lately

Last Updated July 28, 2020

SQL ConstantCare

SQL ConstantCare® analyzed over 3,000 of your SQL Servers this month. Here are the things we check for and the number of servers where we found this problem this month: Backup Back Up Your TDE Certificate – 137 servers affected Take a Full Backup – 370 servers affected Take a Log Backup – 353 servers affected…

SQL ConstantCare® Population Report: Spring 2020

Last Updated June 1, 2020

SQL Server Population Report, Videos

Ever wonder what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates, hardware sizes, or numbers of databases? Let’s find out in the spring 2020 version of our population report. Our SQL ConstantCare® service lets users send data in about their SQL Servers and get health & performance advice via email. Users can opt in to…

SQL Server 2019 Standard Edition Feature Limitations Are Out

Last Updated October 18, 2019

SQL Server 2019

The features list by edition is out, and there’s a disclaimer at the top: This content is being updated for SQL Server 2019. The information in the article is not final. Which means if you’re really angry, and your company buys a lot of licenses, now’s your time to raise holy hell with your Microsoft…

9 Tips for Faster SQL Server Applications

Last Updated May 23, 2019

Development

Wanna make your SQL Server applications go faster? Here are 9 simple tips that will give you a better chance for success. They’re not carved in stone, but they’re a good place to start. Query Design Tips 1. Code for readability first. The easier your query is for humans to understand, the more likely SQL…

Are your CPU-intensive queries running slowly? Check your VM type.

Last Updated April 28, 2019

SQL Server

When you build a VM for SQL Server in Amazon EC2, Azure VMs, or Google Compute Engine, it’s all too easy to overlook the CPU speeds that you’re getting. Most of the time, it doesn’t really matter because SQL Server isn’t usually CPU-bottlenecked: your queries are doing table scans with 16GB RAM, starving for IO throughput.…

What’s New in SQL Server 2019: 100% Demos

Last Updated December 5, 2019

Want to learn more? Check out my recent SQL Server 2019 posts. You haven’t installed SQL Server 2019 yet, and you don’t want to sit through a bunch of slides. You want to see a series of real-world demos focusing on the features of SQL Server 2019 that will make your users happier with as…

[Video] Office Hours 2018/12/19 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated December 22, 2018

This week, Erik, Tara, and Richie discuss disaster recovery, Python vs C# for SQL Server, whether you should perform log backups on primary or secondary on AGs, why Postgres is so popular, using mount points for tempdb, attention events, database corruption, MERGE statements, restoring a table from a database, features they look forward to in…

[Video] Office Hours 2018/12/12 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated December 17, 2018

This week, Erik and Richie discuss TSQL classes, scalar functions, index reorganize vs rebuild, daily image backups on a fringe SQL server on VMWare, number of databases per AG, best practices for ETL operations, and more! Here’s the video on YouTube: You can register to attend next week’s Office Hours, or subscribe to our podcast to listen…

[Video] Office Hours 2018/10/24 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated October 28, 2018

Locking, Blocking, and Isolation Levels

This week, Brent, Tara, and Richie discuss increasing a table’s varchar field from 1 to 2, predicting how long CHECKDB should take, SQL Server configuration options, reporting, reducing high waits, analysis services for SQL Azure, advice to first time PASS attendees, compatibility levels, cardinality estimator, PowerShell, and Tara’s hairdo. Here’s the video on YouTube: You…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: Collecting Query Plans

Last Updated June 24, 2018

Erik Darling

SQL ConstantCare

Coming Soon In an upcoming release, we’ll start collecting query plans from your servers. Since this may result in the transmission of PII, it will be opt-in only. We won’t be getting this by default, because we don’t want anyone to be uncomfortable with the level of data we’re collecting from their servers. This is…

How Computed Columns Can Cause Blocking

Last Updated May 1, 2021

Erik Darling

The short story: when you add a computed column that references another table, like with a scalar user-defined function, you can end up causing concurrency problems even when people didn’t really want to go see that other table, and that table is locked by someone else. Here’s my query: Transact-SQL SELECT Id, u.DisplayName, u.BadgeCount FROM…

Two Code Patterns That Don’t Virtualize Well

Last Updated January 19, 2018

T-SQL

Virtualization used to be a really Big Deal™ for database admins: we had to do a lot of careful planning to get a virtualization project done right. These days, virtualization is more and more of a no-brainer: most apps make the transition just fine. Every now and then, though, an exception pops up – usually…

[Video] Office Hours 2017/12/20 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated December 23, 2017

This week Brent, Erik, and Richie discuss truncating & repopulating, failed logins, their choice for high availability, PowerBI, read committed isolation, parameter sniffing, database mirroring, extended events and failing queries and re-indexing large tables. Here’s the video on YouTube: You can register to attend next week’s Office Hours, or subscribe to our podcast to listen on the…

[Video] Office Hours 2017/09/13 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated October 7, 2017