The “include actual execution plan” feature in SQL Server Management Studio is an invaluable tool for performance tuning. It returns the actual execution plan used for each statement, including actual row counts, tempdb spills and a lot of other information you need to do performance tuning.
But sometimes you want to run a series of statements or procedures where you only want the execution plan for some of the statements. Here’s how:
A quick way to improve I/O performance is to set a good fill factor. This installment of the series on efficient data discusses fill factors and page splits, and how they affect physical I/O performance.
This is the third part in a series of articles on optimizing large volumes of data. This part is all about using compression, and since I wrote an article on that a few months ago, I’m not going to re-invent the wheel. So this article is a repost of my july article on compression.
If you’re lucky enough to be working with an Enterprise Edition of SQL Server, you may be missing out on a really great feature that can boost your I/O performance considerably. And as an added bonus, it’ll save you disk space..