T-SQL Tuesday #064 – Calling All Tuners and Gearheads

Invitation and roundup from Russ Thomas.

This is your official invite to the SQL Server Performance Grand National.  I want posts tackling “focused” performance tuning.

By “focused” I mean tackle something head on; the more secret sauce, tricks, code samples, operator costs, or demonstrable metrics against a defined problem the better.  This month is for the gear heads.  Don’t wimp out by avoiding hints, plans, or guides.  General practice is for wusses.  Write something that’ll either go BIG or flame out half-way down the track.  Drag racers aren’t grocery getters.  If your post begins with the phrase… should be implemented with caution – you’re doing it right.  If you’re an SSIS, SSDT, SSRS person – we’ve got a funny car division for you too.  Tell us edge cases where you’ve make your stuff scream.

Need some ideas?

  • Tackle a non set based problem you’ve improved in the wild
  • Discuss hardware settings or IO – anyone using a flash array?
  • Got a solution to a niche wait type?
  • Tackle indexing edges (good or bad)
  • Columnstore !!!
  • Hash buckets !!!
  • Parallelism !!!
  • Break down and improve a peculiar query plan operator

T-SQL Tuesday #049 – My Go-To Query For Waiting Tasks

Invitation and roundup from Robert Davis.

T-SQL Tuesday #043 – Hello, Operator?

Invitation and roundup from Rob Farley.

The topic is Plan Operators. If you ever write T-SQL, you will almost certainly have looked at execution plans (if you haven’t, go look at some now. I mean really – you should be looking at this stuff). As you look at these things, you will almost certainly have had your interest piqued by some, and tried to figure out a bit more about what’s going on.

That’s what I want you to write about! One (or more) plan operators that you looked into. It could be a particular aspect of a plan operator, or you could do a deep dive and tell us everything you know. You could relate a tuning story if you want, or it could be completely academic. Don’t just quote Books Online at me, explain what the operator means to you. You could explore the Compute Scalar operator, or the many-to-many feature of a Merge Join. The Sequence Project, or the Lazy Spool. You’re bound to have researched one of them at some point (if you never have, take the opportunity this week), and have some wisdom to impart. This is a chance to raise the collective understanding about execution plans!