Erik Darling shows us the bright side of a memory equipped to forget:
I often have to talk clients down from odd ledges. At this point, there’s about 20 years of advice about SQL Server out there, and for various reasons received wisdom often gets migrated en masse, whether it’s still applicable or not.
Outdated trace flags and settings are pretty common, and don’t get me started on coding practices.
But I get it — that stuff came along with advice that still makes sense — like parallelism and memory settings, separating off tempdb, etc.
Unfortunately, it often leads people to the “it used to be fast so it should always be fast” trap based on what used to work, rather than what makes sense currently. Or even what the current problem is.
Read the whole thing. Also, in a rare double-quotation, I want to cite this line from Erik:
“I don’t know, xxVanWilderFan420xx said they were bad and we should avoid them.”
Never fully trust a person going by the pseudonym xxVanWilderFan420xx. However, if it were xxSolomonKaneFan420xx, 100% believe.