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Day: November 27, 2015

Build Your Own Statistics

Published 2015-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Dan Holmes shows how to build custom statistics:

There is a performance benefit to imported stats. The cost to compute the stats are on an “offline” table. The only downtime for the production table is the duration of the stream import.

This process does use undocumented features and it looks like it could be dangerous, but remember there is an easy undo: the update statistics statement. If something goes wrong, the statistics can always be updated using standard T-SQL.

Scheduling this code to run regularly can greatly help the optimizer produce better plans given a data set that changes over the tipping point but not enough to trigger a statistics update.

This feels like the time of thing you want to know because it’ll come in handy once, but if you feel the need to use it frequently, that may not be the best choice.

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Use The Alt Key

Published 2015-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Mallon talks Alt key:

Everyone knows you can use SHIFT + [Left/Right Arrow] to highlight text. But you can also use ALT + SHIFT + [Up/Down/Left/Right Arrow] to select a block of text or even make a vertical selection to insert a block of text on multiple lines. Or you can use ALT + [Mouse Drag] to make a block selection with your cursor.

Notepad++ works the same way.  Every once in a while, I’ll run into a scenario in some tool which doesn’t implement Alt key functionality—especially certain non-Microsoft platform database products—and it will hurt a little bit inside.

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Error Handling

Published 2015-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Continuing my “classics” series, Erland Sommarskog has a three-part series (with three appendices) on error handling that will take up your entire weekend:

Why do we have error handling in our code? There are many reasons. In a forms application we validate the user input and inform the users of their mistakes. These user mistakes are anticipated errors. But we also need to handle unanticipated errors. That is, errors that occur because we overlooked something when we wrote our code. A simple strategy is to abort execution or at least revert to a point where we know that we have full control. Whatever we do, simply ignoring an unanticipated error is something we should never permit us. This can have grave consequences and cause the application to present incorrect information to the user or even worse to persist incorrect data in the database. It is also important to communicate that an error has occurred, lest that the user thinks that the operation went fine, when your code in fact performed nothing at all.

Error handling is a crucial part of development.  And given that SQL Server has…peculiarities…when it comes to error handling, I highly recommend reading this series.

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Videography Gear

Published 2015-11-27 by Kevin Feasel

Doug Lane has an outstanding post on the types of equipment you should look at if you’re getting into technical presentations:

Your choice(s) here will drive what equipment you need to buy in order to produce a high-quality video on a reasonable budget. You don’t want to overspend on lighting and camera equipment if you’re never going to be shown bigger than a 240×180 pocket in the corner. Likewise, you may not need a USB microphone if you’re going to shoot mostly studio video.

As someone thinking about getting into podcasting and webcasting, this is a top-notch set of advice.

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