Search Results for &#8220;execution plan&#8221;

This week, Erik – all by his lonely self – talks about troubleshooting remote queries, his thoughts on SQL Server 2017, licensing, index rebuilds, index fragmentation, why you shouldn’t restart SQL server every day, and much more! Here’s the video on YouTube: You can register to attend next week’s Office Hours, or subscribe to our podcast to…

SQL Server 2017: query_store_wait_stats

Last Updated May 12, 2017

Query Store (QDS), SQL Server 2017, Wait Stats

The missing link Back when the Query Store first got announced, I was amazed. The amount of information it gathered and persisted between reboots was such a big improvement over the plan cache, plus being able to force plans was really cool. I was always surprised that wait stats weren’t a part of that, especially…

SQL Server 2017: Quick Rundown

Last Updated May 12, 2017

SQL Server 2017

ICYMI Playing with SSMS in the lab Microsoft released CTP 2 of SQL Server vNext (well, yesterday today, but who knows when this thing will hit?). There’s some great new stuff in the Engine in this release that I’m just crazy about getting to know better. Going through the Release Notes made me feel things…

[Video] Office Hours 2017/03/15 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated March 18, 2017

This week, Brent, Richie, and Erik discuss the requirements for getting a Senior DBA or Database Architect job, data migration, encryption, fragmentation, differences between SQL Server 2016 and 2014, update stats strategies for large tables vs small ones, what it takes to work for Brent Ozar Unlimited, and more. Here’s the video on YouTube: You…

Why Cost Threshold For Parallelism Shouldn’t Be Set To 5

Last Updated March 3, 2017

Configuration Settings

CURRENT_YEAR() Here it is, 2017. A full 20 years since SQL Server 7. Back then, there was a developer named Nick. Nick was on the development team, and apparently the query-costing-magic development was done on his machine. All of it. The magical metric was that for every second a query ran, it would cost another…

[Video] Office Hours 2017/03/08 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated March 13, 2017

This week, Erik and Richie discuss creating/updating statistics, tools for viewing large flat file tables, the worst code they have ever seen, high disk queue length, dealing with databases that store blobs, reindexing jobs, transparent data encryption, and more. Here’s the video on YouTube: You can register to attend next week’s Office Hours, or subscribe to our…

Announcing T-SQL Tuesday #86: SQL Server Bugs & Enhancement Requests

Last Updated July 3, 2018

Brent Ozar

T-SQL

I know this is going to come as a stunning shock to you, dear reader, so you may want to be sitting down. SQL Server isn’t perfect. It’s okay. Deep, calming breaths. We’re going to get through this together, and here’s how: Go to Connect.Microsoft.com, the place where we file bug reports and enhancement requests…

Filtered Statistics Follow-up

Last Updated May 26, 2020

Parameter Sniffing, SQL Server, Statistics

During our pre-con in Seattle A really sharp lady brought up using filtered statistics, and for a good reason. She has some big tables, and with just 200 histogram steps, you can miss out on a lot of information about data distribution when you have millions or billions of rows in a table. There’s simply…

Things I Would Love to Put In sp_BlitzCache

Last Updated April 21, 2017

Execution Plans, First Responder Kit, SQL Server

This is my favorite script to work on Getting stuff to work sp_BlitzCache is so rewarding because XML querying is so ridiculous. I wish Mikael Eriksson would write a book already; it’d make my life a whole lot easier. Along the way, I see a lot of things that I would love to warn people…

[Video] Office Hours 2016/11/02 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated November 5, 2016

Execution Plans, Licensing

This week, Brent, Richie, Tara, and Erik discuss vendor licensing, rebuilding indexes, analysis services, using trace flag 174, and the team’s PASS Summit impressions and highlights. 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 go. Enjoy the Podcast? Don’t miss an episode,…

Searching Strings in SQL Server is Expensive

Last Updated June 25, 2018

Brent Ozar

In the classic spirit of my How to Think Like the Engine class, let’s go take a look at the StackOverflow.Users table and find all the users named Brent. There’s a DisplayName field, and I’m going to be querying that a lot in this blog post, so I’ll go ahead and create an index on…

What To Do If sp_BlitzFirst Warns About High Compilations

Last Updated November 16, 2017

First Responder Kit, sp_BlitzFirst, SQL Server

Compiles Aren’t The Same As Recompiles If you’re seeing high RECOMPILES, this post isn’t for you. We’ll talk about the differences between compiles and recompiles, but not how to troubleshoot recompiles. Recompiles mean one of two obvious things: You have a RECOMPILE hint at the stored procedure or statement level, or SQL found a reason…

[Video] Office Hours 2016/06/29 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated July 2, 2016

SQL Server

This week, Erik, Richie, Doug, and Angie discuss a script for getting more information on a specific index, using partition tables, shrinking data and log files, stress testing SQL servers, as well as some entertaining things to ask Siri! Here’s the video on YouTube: You can register to attend next week’s Office Hours, or subscribe to our podcast to…

Expensive Key Lookups

Last Updated December 7, 2017

Expensive Key Lookups We warn about these when a single Key Lookup is >=50% of the total plan cost. A key lookup occurs when SQL uses a nonclustered index to satisfy all or some of a query’s predicates, but it doesn’t contain all the information needed to cover the query. This can happen in two…

SQL Server Features I’d Like To See, Oracle Edition

Last Updated March 18, 2016

Oracle, SQL Server

BUT FRANCE HAS A PONY I really like SQL Server. Most of the time. Okay, so most of the time I like SQL Server most of the time. Don’t get me wrong, if I had to go back through the career-time continuum and pick a RDBMS to work with, I’d probably still choose it over…

Indexing for GROUP BY

Last Updated March 12, 2018

Indexing, SQL Server

It’s not glamorous And on your list of things that aren’t going fast enough, it’s probably pretty low. But you can get some pretty dramatic gains from indexes that cover columns you’re performing aggregations on. We’ll take a quick walk down demo lane in a moment, using the Stack Overflow database. Query outta nowhere! Transact-SQL…

New Updates for sp_Blitz®, sp_BlitzCache™

Last Updated June 19, 2015

Brent Ozar

SQL Server

We’ve just updated our First Responder Kit to include new versions of these tools: sp_Blitz® v41 – June 18, 2015: Added check 162 for CMEMTHREAD waits on servers with >= 8 logical processors per NUMA node. Added check 159 for NUMA nodes reporting dangerously low memory in sys.dm_os_nodes. Added check 161 for a high number of cached…

Indexing for Windowing Functions

Last Updated March 12, 2018