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Category: T-SQL

Views Aren’t Tables

Published 2016-04-06 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey looks at how the query optimizer treats views:

The important point to note is that the optimizer is absolutely not treating the view like a table. The optimizer is treating the view like a query, which is all it is. This has both positive and negative impacts when it comes to query performance tuning and this view. You could spend all sorts of time “tuning” the view, only to find all that tuning you’ve done tossed out the window when the query doesn’t reference a column in the view and that causes the optimizer to rearrange the plan. I don’t want to convey that this is an issue. It’s not. I’m just trying to emphasize the point that a view is just a query.

In a subsequent post, Grant promises to talk about the potential perils of nested views.  That’s where people start running into trouble, when a nested view gets to be so complex that the query optimizer gives up and takes it literally.

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Conditional Ordering

Published 2016-04-06 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher shows various methods for conditional ordering:

Simple sorts are pretty easy. In the ORDER BY clause you can list out the columns by name or by position in the field list and determine if you want them sorted ascending or descending. But how about going beyond that?

Every now and again you need a fairly complex sort order. Say for example you want to order your data differently depending on the Status (say DueDate if theStatus is 1, 2 or 3 and ShipDate otherwise). But you also want anyone with aTotalDue greater than $5000 sorted separately from those with a TotalDue less than $5000.

Conditional sorting isn’t something you should be doing in every query, but it’s important enough to know about.

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Circular References

Published 2016-04-05 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Hutmacher looks at circular references in recursive CTEs:

Suppose you have a tree hierarchy where (among other members) “3” is the parent of “8”, “8” is the parent of “B” and “B” is the parent of “E”. You could easily draw this as a branch structure where the members could be profit centers of a company, divisions of government, managers and employees, product lines, cell references in an Excel sheet or pretty much anything that can be described as a hierarchy.

3
--8
  --B
    --E

Now, if we say that “E” is the parent of “3”, we’ve created a circular reference, and we end up with an infinite recursion. What that means is that if you follow the tree from the root to the leaf level, you’ll end up going round and round in circles. In terms of a database query, that means that the query will go on forever until it either fills up your log file or tempdb, or until the maximum number of recursions (OPTION MAXRECURSION) is reached, whichever happens first.

I did something similar a while back with foreign key dependencies.  Because foreign key relationships are potentially cyclical graphs, they can easily fall into the same scenario.

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Using The OUTPUT Clause

Published 2016-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones shows how to use the OUTPUT clause with an INSERT statement:

I got asked a question about the OUTPUT clause recently and realized I didn’t remember the syntax. I’ve rarely used this, so I had to look it up and thought this would be a good basic post.

The idea with OUTPUT is that the data from the inserted and deleted tables can be output from the INSERT statement, outside of your triggers. This is the same data, but you can access it in the insert.

The format is

INSERT xxx OUTPUT yyyy INTO @zzz VALUES (or SELECT) mmmm

If I had one thing I could change about OUTPUT, I’d like to be able to output directly into variables for those cases in which I know I’m only going to get one result (or maybe I only care about one arbitrary result in a set).

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String_Split Performance

Published 2016-03-21 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand looks into how STRING_SPLIT performs compared to other string splitting methods:

So with those limitations out in the open, we can move on to some performance testing. Given Microsoft’s track record with built-in functions that leverage CLR under the covers (coughFORMAT() cough), I was skeptical about whether this new function could come close to the fastest methods I’d tested to date.

Let’s use string splitters to separate comma-separated strings of numbers, this way our new friend JSON can come along and play too. And we’ll say that no list can exceed 8,000 characters, so no MAX types are required, and since they’re numbers, we don’t have to deal with anything exotic like Unicode.

The results are surprising.  I expected it to be somewhere around CLR-level, but not way better.

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Find Object Dependencies

Published 2016-03-18 by Kevin Feasel

Manoj Pandey has pulled out the code used in Management Studio to get dependencies:

And here is a very lengthy (~900 lines) T-SQL Code that I generated from SSMS & SQL Profiler to check the same Dependencies of a Table in SQL Server 2014. You can also create a Stored Procedure and apply the Table & Schema as parameters.

You can just replace the Table & Schema in the first 2 lines and execute the code to check table dependencies

You might be able to optimize this script, but it’s nice to have a starting point.

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SELECT INTO With UNION

Published 2016-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Strate shows us that you can use a UNION (or UNION ALL) to insert into a temp table:

What makes this interesting is when I am using UNION to join the results. How do you place a final resultset from a UNION, EXCEPT, or INTERSECT into a temporary table using SELECT INTO? Where does the INTO portion of the query go?

This is actually a pretty simple thing to do. The INTO for the SELECT INTO goes into the first query of the set. An example of UNIONing the results from sys.dm_exec_query_stats and sys.dm_exec_query_stats into a temporary table is provided in listing 1.

No subqueries are necessary here.

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Null Bytes In Text Strings

Published 2016-03-08 by Kevin Feasel

Jay Robinson has null bytes he wants to remove from Unicode strings:

As it turns out, when you have a character string in SQL Server that contains character 0x000, it really doesn’t know what to do with it most of the time, especially when you’re dealing with Unicode strings.

I did track down http://sqlsolace.blogspot.com/2014/07/function-dbostripunwantedcharacters.html, but I generally try to avoid calling UDF’s in my queries.

Jay’s got an answer which works, so check it out.  Also, I second the use of the #sqlhelp hashtag.  There’s a great community watching that hashtag.

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