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Category: Indexing

Create Index With Drop_Existing Bug

Published 2017-04-03 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little describes a bug that she encountered in discussions with a reader:

My first thought was that perhaps there is some process that runs against the production system and the test system that goes to sleep with an open transaction, holding an X or an IX lock against this table. If the index create can’t get its shared lock, then it could be part of a blocking chain.

So I asked first if the index create was the head of the blocking chain, or if it was perhaps blocked by something else. The answer came back that no, the index create was NOT blocked. It was holding the shared lock for a long time.

My new friend even sent a screenshot of the index create running against the test instance in sp_WhoIsActive with blocking_session_id null.

Read on for the full story and keep those systems patched.

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It Depends: Key Lookup Edition

Published 2017-03-22 by Kevin Feasel

Raul Gonzalez shows a case in which having a key lookup beats having a covering index:

This is a very special case where the covering index has three keys and then a couple of included columns, one of which is NVARCHAR(MAX) column, so the covering index is pretty big and we only seek in the leftmost column, which is also possible using another much smaller index on that single column.

In both cases, the operator is able to push the query predicate(s) to the seek and thanks to that, the number of rows coming out the operator is not that big. But the number of rows which match the leftmost key and therefore have to be read is quite big.

That’s why it’s so important to test queries rather than assuming you know how they will behave:  sometimes the normal answer isn’t quite so.

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Indexing Foreign Keys

Published 2017-03-22 by Kevin Feasel

Kim Tripp looks at the practice of adding non-clustered indexes on columns which make up foreign key constraints:

I’m going to tie today’s post with a question I received recently: if I have a table that has 6 foreign key columns/references should I create one index with all 6 foreign key columns in it, or should I create 6 individual indexes – one for each foreign key reference.

This is an interesting question with a few tangents to cover for our SQL101 series. I consider indexing foreign keys as part of my “Phase 1 of index tuning.” But, let’s go back to some basics before we dive into the answer on this one.

Read on for Kim’s thoughts on the topic and some good practices.

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Indexing Woes

Published 2017-03-16 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill relates a tale of trying to create an index with a SQL Agent job.  Easy, right?

Now I’m angry too since I count these failures as personal and I don’t like failing, so I get cracking on the investigation.
Straight away, that error message doesn’t help my mood.
I’m not indexing a view!
I’m not including computed columns!
It’s not a filtered index!
The columns are not xml data types, or spatial operations!
And nowhere, nowhere am I using double quotes to justify needing to set QUOTED_IDENTIFIER on!

SO WTF SQL SERVER, WHY ARE YOU GIVING ME THESE ERRORS???

Read the whole thing.

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Clustered Index And Physical Storage

Published 2017-02-27 by Kevin Feasel

Wayne Sheffield busts a myth:

In several of my last few blog posts, I’ve shared several methods of getting internal information from a database by using the DBCC PAGE command and utilizing the “WITH TABLERESULTS” option to be allowed to automate this process for further processing. This post will also do this, but in this case, we’ll be using it to bust a common myth—data in a clustered index is physically stored on disk in the order of the clustered index.

Busting this myth

To bust this myth, we’ll create a database, put a table with a clustered index into this database, and then we’ll add some rows in random order. Next, we will show that the rows are stored on the pages in logical order, and then we’ll take a deeper look at the page internals to see that the rows are not stored in physical order.

Read on for the proof.

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Maintenance Plan Updates

Published 2017-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill looks at maintenance plan updates in SQL Server 2016:

True to my typical post style which focuses on small shops, accidental DBAs, and junior DBAs I went looking for something that could very easily benefit people that are using the basic SQL Server features.  In this case they may not even realize how limited they were.

I chose to write about Index Maintenance in the built-in Maintenance Plan portion of SQL Server.

A brief summary of the built-in Maintenance Plans is that they allow you to drag-and-drop your way to basic SQL Server maintenance items such as Backups, Index maintenance, CheckDB, Statistics updating, etc.  This a tool that has been around since at least version 7 that I know of.  It wasn’t always very good, and it gets a bad rap from a lot of DBAs.  It has been dramatically improved over the years in flexibility and reliability.

Read on for the changes.  I’m really not a fan of maintenance plans, but if they’re going to exist, they should at least be as good as possible.

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HTDELETE Wait Type

Published 2017-02-14 by Kevin Feasel

Joey D’Antoni troubleshoots a query with excessive HTDELETE waits:

Ultimately I think any thought of the readable secondary having a vastly different plan was a red herrings. Statistics are going to be the same on both instances, and if there were a missing statistic on the secondary, SQL Server would create it in TempDB. Anyway, columnstore indexes don’t use statistics in the traditional sense.

Fortunately I was able to catch a query in the process of waiting on HTDELETE, so I no longer had to look for the needle in the haystack, and I could get to tuning the plans. I was able to grab the SELECT part of the query and generate an estimated plan on both the primary and secondary nodes. The plans were virtually the same on both nodes, with just a minor difference in memory grant between them.

Click through for the solution.

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Full-Text Search

Published 2017-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little gives the scoop on full-text indexing:

The “dirty little secret” about full-text search indexes is that they don’t help with ‘%blabla%’ predicates.

Well, it’s not a secret, it’s right there in the documentation.

A lot of us get the impression that full-text search is designed to handle “full wildcard” searches, probably just because of the name. “Full-Text Searches” sounds like it means “All The Searches”. But that’s not actually what it means.

Kendra’s take is a bit more optimistic than mine; I’m definitely more inclined to dump text out to a Lucene-based indexing system (like Solr or ElasticSearch), as they’ll typically perform faster and solve problems that full-text cannot.  Some of that may just be that I was never very good at full-text indexing, though.

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When To Define Clustered Index Columns On Non-Clustered Indexes

Published 2017-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Kim Tripp explains when to include a clustered index column on a non-clustered index column’s definition:

So, when SHOULD you explictly define the clustering key columns in a nonclustered index? When they ARE needed by the query.

This sounds rather simple but if the column is USED by the query then the index MUST have the column explicitly defined. Yes, I realize that SQL Server will add it… so it’s not necessary NOW but what if things change? (this is the main point!)

One of the more common cases I could think of is multi-part clustered indexes, like on a junction table.

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NCCI Online Rebuild

Published 2017-01-23 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer notes a big improvement in vNext:

For the Columnstore Indexes, the only online operation for the indexes that was available so far, was the Row Group Merging and Removal with ALTER INDEX REORGANIZE (as well as the Tuple Mover operations). With appearance of HTAP scenarios (Hybrid Transactional Analytical Processing aka Operational Analytics) in SQL Server 2016, there was a huge need for the online index maintenance, making sure that the operational part of the HTAP runs smoothly. For any online business, taking their application down for an hour means loosing real money and even worse – loosing credibility from their customers. To my knowledge, Microsoft was very much aware and was working on improving this missing part.
For the SQL Server vNext version (after SQL Server 2016) in CTP 1.2, yesterday, we have finally received the first Online Rebuild operation for the Columnstore Indexes – in this case for the Nonclustered Columnstore Indexes, and this is a huge news for anyone using the HTAP scenarios.
Naturally this feature is Enterprise Edition Only, and like ever before – if you are running a critical workload, you need to step up and use the Enterprise Edition.

Online clustered columnstore reorganization in 2016 was a life-saver, and I’m looking forward to online clustered columnstore rebuilding at some point in the future.

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