Can SQL Server piece together two different indexes in a single-table query, rather than just giving up and scanning a suboptimal clustered index? The short answer is: yes, in a fairly narrow band of conditions.
Continue readingSQL Server concepts
DATEDIFF performs implicit conversions
As I was performance tuning a query, I found that a number of date calculation functions in SQL Server appear to be forcing a conversion of their date parameters to a specific datatype, adding computational work to a query that uses them. In programming terms, it seems that these functions do not have “overloads”, i.e. different code paths depending on the incoming datatype.
So let’s take a closer look at how this manifests itself.
Continue readingSTRING_SPLIT(), but for quoted names
Can you apply gaps and islands logic on a string? Sure you can.
Continue readingAbout wildcards and data type precedence
Implicit conversions in SQL Server follow a specific, predictable order, called data type precedence. This means that if you compare or add/concatenate two values, a and b, with different data types, you can predict which one will be implicitly converted to the data type of the other one in order to be able to complete the operation.
I stumbled on an interesting exception to this rule the other day.
Continue readingSet up access to network shares from SQL Server
Using a local service account for your SQL Server service, your server won’t automatically have permissions to access to other network resources like UNC paths. Most commonly, this is needed to be able to perform backups directly to a network share.
Using a domain account as your SQL Server service account will allow the server to access a network share on the same domain, but if the network share is not on your domain, like an Azure File Share, you need a different solution.
There’s a relatively easy way to make all of this work, though.
Continue readingHow to add “created” and “updated” timestamps without triggers
You have a table that you want to add “created” and “updated” timestamp columns to, but you can’t update the application code to update those columns. In the bad old times, you had to write a trigger to do the hard work for you. Triggers introduce additional complexity and potentially even a performance impact.
So here’s a nicer way to do it, trigger-free.
Continue readingHow MERGE on two different rows can still deadlock you
I recently ran into a curious deadlock issue. I have a process that performs a lot of updates in a “state” table using multiple, concurrent connections. The business logic in the application guarantees that two connections won’t try to update the same item, so we shouldn’t ever run into any locking issues. And yet, we keep getting deadlocks.
What’s going on here? Hint: it has to do with isolation levels and range locks.
Continue readingConnecting a SQL Server client on Linux using Active Directory authentication
or: How I learned to stop worrying, and love all-caps domain names.
I’m a complete beginner at Linux, so I should preface this post with the fact that these are my humble notes after hours of pulling my hair. It’s not really a fully-fledged how-to article, and there are lot of things I’m not covering. But I figured it may help someone out there at some point.
Continue readingIs a sort faster when the data is already sorted?
Whenever SQL Server needs to sort a data stream, it will use the Sort operator to reorder the rows of the stream. Sorting data is an expensive operation because it entails loading part or all of the data into memory and shifting that data back and forth a couple of times. The only time SQL Server doesn’t sort the data is when it already knows the data to be ordered correctly, like when it has already passed a Sort operator or it’s reading from an appropriately sorted index.
But what happens if the data is ordered correctly, but SQL Server doesn’t know about it? Let’s find out.
Continue readingThe curious case of the Top N Sort
Watching Brent Ozar’s 2017 PASS Summit session on Youtube the other day, I learned that the Top N Sort operation in SQL Server behaves dramatically differently, depending on how many rows you want from the TOP.
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