The Power Of Proper Indexing
This image is an actual screen shot of one of our production SQL Server’s CPU usage, taken from our SQL Sentry monitoring system. Obviously this server was under some strain. …
Setting Drive Allocation Unit Size With PowerShell
There seems to be some ongoing debate around whether or not formatting your data and log drives with 64KB allocation unit size even matters anymore. I would encourage you to …
SQL Scripts: Find Queries That Have Missing Index Requests
In a previous article, I went over how SQL Server will recommend an index that it believes will help a query run faster, and I showed how to find missing …
SQL Scripts: How To Find Missing Indexes
One of the really cool things that SQL Server does is keep up with index statistics behind the scenes. It knows how an index has been used, how often it …
Performance Problem When Using OR In A JOIN
I recently had a developer come to me with a poorly performing query. As you will see below, it’s a fairly straight forward query, consisting of one table with one …
You Can Now Specify MAXDOP For DBCC CheckDB!
I just stumbled on this today. According to the DBCC CheckDB documentation, as of SQL Server 2014 Service Pack 2 you can now specify MAXDOP when running DBCC CheckDB! The documentation states: …
Why you should not prefix your stored procedures with “sp_”
One nasty habit that seems to persist throughout the ages with developers (I even did it myself) is the tendency to put “sp_” at the beginning of stored procedure names …
NOLOCK may not be doing what you think it does
When working with developers, I’ve noticed that some have a tendency to put WITH (NOLOCK) on every table in a SELECT query. When I inquire about this, the typical response I …