I’ve solved this puzzle a number of times, but I’ve never really been quite happy with the result. It was either too slow, too much code, too hard to understand. So here’s a fresh take at computing the time-to-payment on a large amount of invoices, with multiple, overlapping, partial payments.
Continue readingSQL Server concepts
Scalar function inlining in SQL Server 2019
This insanely cool new performance-related update is one of nicest features in SQL Server 2019, and certainly one I’ve been looking forward to for a long time.
If you’ve done any work around performance tuning and user-defined scalar functions, I’m pretty sure you’ll love this.
Continue readingOperations that need a serial plan
Some operations in SQL Server will turn your entire query plan serial (single-threaded), others will just reserve a so-called “serial zone”. I read up on this stuff a number of years ago (including a great post by Paul White), and thinking that some things must have changed since, I decided to go see for myself.
Quiz: What’s going on here, then?
I’m trying a new type of blog post, and if it works out, I would be happy to post more of the same going forward. The format is a real-world troubleshooting mystery, and I’ll clue you in to the details along the way.
How quickly can you crack it?
Computed columns with scalar functions
Scalar functions can be a real headache when you’re performance tuning. For one, they don’t parallelize. In fact, if you use a scalar function in a computed column, it will prevent any query that uses that table from going parallel – even if you don’t reference that column at all!
Legacy apps that don’t believe in schemas
Inspired by an actual customer scenario: what if you have a legacy app that doesn’t schema-prefix its database objects, but you want it to work with a specific assigned schema? There’s a quick and easy solution.
Effective permissions on SQL Server
SQL Server Management Studio allows you to view effective permissions on an object, but it’s limited in a few important respects. To work around some of those limitations, I’ve built a stored procedure to display all the defined and effective permissions across an entire SQL Server database.
Automatically guessing foreign key constraints
With good naming and datatyping conventions, an automated script can help you with the process of creating foreign key constraints across your database, or actually, suggest table relations where you’ve forgotten to implement them.
Practical uses of binary types
The binary datatype of SQL Server is one of those features most developers don’t really use that often, but it turns out there’s more to binary values than just storing large, non-relational blobs.
A visual representation of SQL Server Agent jobs
If all you have is a hammer, everything will eventually start looking like a nail. This is generally known as Maslow’s hammer and refers to the fact that you use the tools you know to solve any problem, regardless if that’s what the problem actually needs. With that said, I frequently need a way to visualize the load distribution of scheduled jobs over a day or week, but I could never be bothered to set up a web server, learn a procedural programming language or build custom visualizations in PowerBI.
So here’s how to do that without leaving Management Studio.
