A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Tracy Boggiano asked about Query Store and got some good responses:
Happy St. Patrick’s Day (are you wearing something green)! For March I asked everyone to blog something related to Query Store, here is a summary of in alphabetical order of the blog posts we received although Rob Farley gets credit for being first.
To be fair, Rob does live in the future.
Leave a CommentBrent Ozar has some tips if you use RECOMPILE hints frequently:
The first query’s plan stuck around in memory, so it now shows 2 executions, and 2 total rows returned. Its row metrics are correct through the life of the stored procedure’s time in cache.
However, the second query – the one with the recompile hint – has a brand new plan in the cache, but also new metrics. You’re not just recompiling the execution plan, but you’re also not getting query plan metrics here. (That’s fine, and that part I was also kinda aware of.)
But the part that I keep forgetting is that when I’m looking at the stored procedure’s totals in sp_BlitzCache, the total, min, and max values are useless:
If the plan cache isn’t going to help, what will? Brent tells you exactly what.
Leave a CommentJason Brimhall takes us through some of the internals of Query Store as exposed by Extended Events:
One of my favorite questions to ask during some of presentations on XE is “What was the first version of SQL Server to have Query Store?” You can imagine the wide array of answers but what is interesting is how often the correct answer is always missed. I hear lots of answers for 2012, some answers for 2017 and somewhere in between for 2016. But never does the correct answer pop up.
Right now, I hope you are scratching your head at that last statement. You see, the question is somewhat of a trick question. The first version of SQL Server that has QDS is SQL Server 2014. However, the first version where you can actually use it is SQL Server 2016. This fun fact is visible when we start exploring SQL Server from the realm of XE. Let’s take a look.
Read the whole thing.
Leave a CommentJohn Sterrett shows us an unorthodox use of Query Store:
Today, I wanted to talk about my least favorite part of replaying workloads. It’s having an extended event or server-side trace running during a workload replay only so we can compare the results at a query-level when the replay is finished. Now, this might seem like a trivial thing but when you have workloads over 10k batch requests/sec this can consume terabytes of data quickly. The worst part is waiting to read all the data, slice and dice the data for analysis.
Starting with SQL Server 2016 there is a better and faster way to go! You can replace your extended event or server-side trace with Query Store captured data. Today, I will show you how to use the Query Store for the same purpose.
Click through for the solution.
Leave a CommentErin Stellato has some thoughts on Query Store adoption:
Last fall we had a previous customer reach out for help after they had to wait 45 minutes for a database to come online after a server reboot. The database queries were blocked by QDS_LOADDB waits. There were three things in play here – the first was that they had CAPTURE_MODE set to ALL, and it should be AUTO. Second, they didn’t have trace flag 7752 enabled (the behavior of which is now the default in SQL Server 2019). And the third was that their Query Store was 100GB in size. The workload was fairly ad hoc, so these three things together caused the problem initially described. They implemented the TF, made multiple changes to the settings (set CAPTURE_MODE to AUTO, changed MAX_STORAGE_SIZE_MB to 10GB, decreased CLEANUP_POLICY to 3 days), and then Query Store was usable for them.
Read on for more examples.
Leave a CommentDavid Fowler takes a look at an issue with Query Store:
We moseyed on down to the server in question to take a look at it. One thing stood out immediately, CPU was pegged out at 100% but SQL itself didn’t actually seem to be doing anything, transactionssecond was on the floor. Unfortunately this happened a while back and I didn’t think to capture any graphs or metrics at the time so you’re just going to have to take my word for this.
After looking into a few different things, the mention of spinlock contention came up. I’ll be honest here, actual spinlock contention is rare and is something that I’ve seen cause an issue only a handful of times so it’s something that I don’t generally get to until I’ve ruled out just about everything else.
David’s scenario was on an older patch of SQL Server and it was fixed later. It’s a good reminder to keep those servers patched.
Leave a CommentTracy Boggiano shows us how to track the performance impact of Query Store on an environment:
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday blogging party is brought to you well by me and I wanted to talk more about Query Store. I did write a book on it but there if still more to know about that is not in the book. I am sure the rest of everyone’s posts will prove enlightening and provide valuable content for folks using or looking to implement Query Store. Someone should have told Grant to hold off a week on his post about DROP / CREATE of procedures and what happens with plan forcing so it could officially be part of the party.
I frequently get asked while presenting about the impact of running Query Store on the instance and one thing that was not in the book was the performance counters that were added to help track just that.
You should probably buy a bunch of copies of Tracy’s book. Just in case.
Leave a CommentMark Wilkinson gives us two separate takes on Query Store:
When the Query Data Store (QDS) feature was announced for SQL Server 2016, we were excited about the prospect of being able to have deep insight on any query running in our environment. I work for a company that deals heavily in the e-commerce space, and we have a large SQL Server footprint. Our environment is unique in that is essentially a multi-tenant system, but all the tenants could have wildly different workloads. It’s really the kind of query execution scenario QDS was built for. We had the pleasure of working with the Microsoft SQLCAT team to get 2016 and QDS up and running in our production environment before it was GA.
In this post I’m going to share two stories about our QDS experience (from pre and post GA of the feature). One from the perspective of the Database Developer, and one from the Database Administrator. For the most part this is not a technical post full of queries and code samples. It’s just me talking about some things I have experienced using QDS in production.
CentralQDS, by the way, is really cool. Hopefully we’re able to show that to the world someday (and note how I say “we” even though I did absolutely nothing with it except for being in the same company as the people who developed it).
Leave a CommentRob Farley explains why Azure Data Studio can’t be a 100% thing right now:
But the big thing with this new laptop is that I’ve made a conscious decision about what to install on it. And particularly, what things to NOT install.
For example, I’ve only installed SQL inside docker, not directly on Windows. I’m running the Linux version just because I can.
But today I feel like I’ve compromised.
Today I’ve installed SSMS, instead of persisting with just Azure Data Studio. It only took a week for me to cave, and the reason is Query Store.
Read on to understand why. I ended up having to cave on Docker-only for SQL Server because of PolyBase components that I needed and which aren’t (yet?) supported in the Linux version.
Leave a CommentJess Pomfret wraps up a T-SQL Tuesday on life hacks:
A lot of people had more than one life hack so I recommend reading all of the posts linked to below. For this summary post I’ve tried to pick one or two hacks from each post and group them into logical buckets.
There are several hacks shared that I plan on integrating into my life, and I hope this post will serve as a good reference for us all going forward.
There were some interesting entries in here.
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