In the previous post I talked about how query optimization works, the role the Cardinality Estimator (CE) plays, and why you should care. Today I am going to break down some of the details about the differences between the old and new CE, as well as show some examples and scenarios. What’s New in the SQL 2014 … Read more
This is the first of two posts on the new Cardinality Estimator in SQL Server 2014. SQL Server 2014 comes with a lot of shiny things. Hekaton (or as Microsoft Marketing likes to call it, In-Memory OLTP), updateable Columnstore indexes, and buffer pool extensions are some of the more common enhancements. All of those new … Read more
SQL Server 2014 has a lot of shiny new features. One of the brightest is In-Memory OLTP Hekaton, something I have been optimistic about (get the pun?) ever since I saw it at the PASS Summit in 2012. These days there is no shortage of information available to day regarding how Hekaton is full of … Read more
We all crave routine in our life, from the time we are babies through adulthood. Routine and familiarity. This extends to how we do performance monitoring and troubleshooting. Everyone has their favorite set of tools to help get the job done, tools that have a familiar routine involved to make them work best for us. Over the … Read more
I’ve witnessed many novice administrators make the common mistake of believing that the SQL Server upgrade process for a database server is as easy as pressing a few buttons.
Recently it was brought to my attention that the query_hash and query_plan_hash columns inside of sys.dm_exec_requests were returning NULL values. I think everyone knows how I feel about NULLs already, but this was slightly more concerning. See, I work for a company that makes this wonderful tool called Database Performance Analyzer (DPA), and we rely … Read more
