Category: Statistics

Erin Stellato shows us a smarter way to update statistics using Ola Hallengren’s index optimization script:

With this option, if no rows have changed, the statistic will not be updated.  If one or more rows have changed, the statistic will be updated.

Since the release of SP1 for 2012, this has been my only challenge with Ola’s scripts.  In SQL Server 2008R2 SP2 and SQL Server 2012 SP1 they introduced the sys.dm_db_stats_properties DMV, which tracks modifications for each statistic.  I have written custom scripts to use this information to determine if stats should be updated, which I’ve talked about here.  Jonathan has also modified Ola’s script for a few of our customers to look at sys.dm_db_stats_properties to determine if enough data had changed to update stats, and a long time ago we had emailed Ola to ask if he could include an option to set a threshold.  Good news, that option now exists!

Keeping statistics up to date is a nice way of quietly improving performance in a system.

Monica Rathbun walks us through the benefits of having statistics on tables in SQL Server:

Statistics are made up of three parts. Each part tells the optimizer important information regarding the make up the table’s data distribution.

Header – Last Time Stats were updated and number of sample rows

Density Vector – Uniqueness of the columns or set of columns

Histogram– Data’s distribution and frequency of distinct values

Let’s look at a Header, Density and Histogram example.

You can read what the statistic are broken down into using DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS. All field definitions are taken from MSDN.

This is from AdventureWorks2016CTP3 sample database, if you want to follow along. Using the Sales. SalesOrderDetail table let’s look the stats and see what we can find out what it shows us.

Read the whole thing.

Monica Rathbun gives us five methods for finding cardinality estimate values when running a SQL Server query:

A second option is to use statistics profiling. This was introduced in SQL Server 2014 and is easily set by using SET STATISTICS PROFILE ON orenable query profiling globally using DBCC TRACEON (7412, -1). This trace flag is only available in SQL Server 2016 SP1 and above.  Selecting from the dynamic management view (DMV) Sys.dm_exec_query_profiles you can do real time query execution progress monitoring while the query is running.  This option will return estimated and actual rows by operator.

Click through for the full set of methods.

Dmitry Piliugin shows one way that we can optimize a query whose main problem is poor row estimates:

A model variation is a new concept in the cardinality estimation framework 2014, that allows easily turn on and off some model assumptions and cardinality estimation algorithms. Model variations are based on a mechanism of pluggable heuristics and may be used in special cases. I think they are left for Microsoft support to be able to address some client’s CE issues pointwise.

Today we are going to view some interesting model variation, that creates filtered statistics on-the-fly. I should give a disclaimer here.

Warning: All the information below is presented for purely educational and curiosity purposes. This is completely undocumented and unsupported and should not ever be used in production systems unless Microsoft support will recommend you. More to the point, the usage of this model variation may affect the overall server performance in a negative way. This should be used for experiments and in the test environment only.

It’s interesting reading, though do heed that warning.  This also isn’t a quick operation (seeing as how the database engine is creating filtered statistics), so it’s not a first-best choice.  But worth keeping your back pocket.

Grant Fritchey shows us how (safely) to collect data on statistics usage:

Years ago I was of the opinion that it wasn’t really possible to see the statistics used in the generation of a query plan. If you read the comments here, I was corrected of that notion. However, I’ve never been a fan of using undocumented trace flags. Yeah, super heroes like Fabiano Amorim and Paul White use them, but for regular individuals like me, it seems like a recipe for disaster. Further, if you read about these trace flags, they cause problems on your system. Even Fabiano was getting the occasional crash.

So, what’s a safe way to get that information? First up, Extended Events. If you use the auto_stats event, you can see the statistics getting created and getting loaded and used. Even if they’re not created, you can see them getting loaded. It’s an easy way to quickly see which statistics were used to generate a plan. One note, you’ll have to compile or recompile a given query to see this in action.

Read on for more.

Bill Wolf continues his series on statistics by looking at what DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS gives you:

When I was putting together the lesson plans for this, I wanted to make my own query for the comparisons, not borrow one from another site or blog.  Yes, I borrow plenty, but I wanted this to be mine.  When I was presenting my “code tuning” class, I had recently upgraded my instance from 2012 to 2017.  I had also put my database into 2017 compatibility mode.  I had used this query to show that unions that are intensive can cause issues with tempdb and cause spill over.  To my “joy”, when I ran the query in the class I did not get the tempdb spillover.  And right then I realized that I was not in Kansas(2012 compatibility) any longer.  But this proved to be opportunistic for the statistics/optimizer comparison.

Read on for a discussion of the cardinality estimator as well.