A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Andy Mallon teaches us when we need to use WITH OVERRIDE on RECONFIGURE:
Should I use WITH OVERRIDE?
Probably not.
That was an easy post. All done! Thanks for reading.
……Oh, right. Let’s talk about why. Books Online actually has the answer:
If that’s too too heavy of reading, you can spend the day on the Transformers Wiki. I mean, it is Friday, after all.
Comments closedSlava Murygin shows ways to simplify starting and stopping SQL Server services on local instances:
Step 3: Easily Stop SQL Server Service.
That is very possible you performed some very heavy and memory intense operation by your local SQL Server instance and it ate all your free memory. You do not need it anymore, but SQL Server won’t easily give memory back.
The easiest way to claim all your memory is to stop your SQL Server.
There are some easy ways doing it:
– First way us using SQL Server Management Studio. You just have to do a right click on your local SQL Server instance and choose “Stop”.
The use case for Slava’s advice is a scenario in which you have SQL Server installed on a local machine with very little RAM.
Comments closedKendra Little talks partition elimination:
Working with table partitioning can be puzzling. Table partitioning isn’t always a slam dunk for performance: heavy testing is needed. But even getting started with the testing can be a bit tricky!
Here’s a (relatively) simple example that walks you through setting up a partitioned table, running a query, and checking if it was able to get partition elimination.
I would have snipped the tl;dr section but it was too long…
Comments closedChris Webb takes a look at MDX querying in SQL Server 2016 Tabular models:
There were a lot of limitations when using DirectQuery in SSAS Tabular 2012/4, but for me the showstopper was the fact that it only worked if you were running DAX queries against your model. Historically the only major client tool that generated DAX queries to get data was Power View, and Power View was/is too limited for serious use, so that alone meant that none of my customers were interested in using DirectQuery. Although we now have Power BI Desktop and PowerBI.com, which also generate DAX queries, the fact remains that the vast majority of business users will still prefer to use Excel PivotTables as their primary client tool – and Excel PivotTables generate MDX queries. So, support for MDX queries in DirectQuery mode in SSAS 2016 means that Excel users will now be able to query a Tabular model in DirectQuery mode. This, plus the performance improvements made to the SQL generated in DirectQuery mode, means that it’s now a feature worth considering in scenarios where you have too much data for SSAS Tabular’s native in-memory engine to handle or where you need to see real-time results.
Good stuff. Read the whole post, especially if (unlike me) you know a thing or two about MDX.
Comments closedGail Shaw has part 2 of her transactions series up:
Again, exactly the desired behaviour. The changes made in the outer procedure were committed, the changes in the inner procedure, the procedure where the error was thrown, were rolled back.
Used correctly, savepoints can be a powerful mechanism for managing transactions in SQL Server. Unfortunately they’re not well known and as such their use can also make code much harder for later developers to debug.
I’ve used conditional transactions fairly regularly (procedures can have calling parent procedures, or sometimes can be called on their own), but never savepoints.
Comments closedEd Elliott has created a tool to auto-name constraints in SQL Server Data Tools:
I have released a tool that will do just that, if you grab the SSDT-Dev Pack at least version 1.1 fromhttps://github.com/GoEddie/SSDT-DevPack/tree/master/release this adds a new menu to the tools menu in visual studio to name constraints. What I like to do is to go to “tools->options–>keyboard” and map an unused short-cut to the command “Tools.NameConstraints”, I used “ctrl+k + ctrl+n” so I can open a table in SSDT and just do ctrl+k and then ctrl+n and it automatically re-writes any tables in the active document that have unnamed primary keys with an appropriate name.
Grab the code or release binary at his Github repo.
Comments closedJack Li on the CSS team answers an interesting question regarding “incomplete” statistics. The key point:
First of all, there is no stats3. SQL Server never stuffs in flight stats to stats blob for use during online index rebuild. Even you are under dirty read, you won’t get non-existing stats3.
Good information.
Comments closedTony Rogerson shows us how to get the fourth Saturday of the month, among other things:
You may want to find for example the date of the 4th Saturday in each month for a given year. This function came out of answering the question here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33694768/how-to-get-list-of-2nd-and-4th-saturday-dates-in-sql-server.
I’ve created it as a Table Valued Function so you can bind it into any query you wish.
Tony created a Table-Valued Function, which is handy but leads me to the classic User-Defined Function reminder: they tend to cause performance problems. One alternative is a dedicated date table with attributes like day of week and nth day of month.
Comments closedDerik Hammer shares a couple of snippets he uses to find objects and SQL Agent jobs.
Here’s one of my favorites, which searches for code within stored procedures, functions, and views:
SELECT OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(sm.object_id) AS SchemaName, OBJECT_NAME(sm.object_id) AS ObjectName, CONCAT(OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(sm.object_id), '.', OBJECT_NAME(sm.object_id)) AS FullName, CONCAT(OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(sm.object_id), '.', OBJECT_NAME(sm.object_id), ',') AS CommaSeparatedName, definition FROM sys.sql_modules sm WHERE sm.definition LIKE '%DEFINITION%' --AND OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(sm.object_id) = 'Something' --AND OBJECT_NAME(sm.object_id) = 'Something' ORDER BY SchemaName, ObjectName;Comments closed
Shawn Melton shows us how to make SQLPS load a bit faster, and which comes with the obligatory warning:
WARNING: You are modifying the files at your own risk. You have been warned.
If you are not familiar with the files involved with a module, you can read more on that here. The file I found most interesting is the “SqlPsPostScript.PS1” file, located in the SQLPS module folder for the given version of SQL Server:
Check it out. Those two seconds you save add up over time.
Comments closed