In this blog post I am doing a quick comparison on the performance implications of using Cell level encryption vs Hashing vs storing the data as plain text […]
OStress.exe – use it if you aren’t already
I was recently trying to simulate the performance implications of hashing vs encryption and wanted to simulate hundreds of sessions and 1000’s of requested on a username/password table. […]
MS SQL Server and Tic Toc and why I changed my mind that it’s a good idea
I am not sure MS has got it right with the release cycle for SQL server. While this debate has happened before (I was then excited that there […]
NULL Management, SPARSE Columns, Vertical partitioning and a query
When discussing DW design I often take a lot of time to emphasize the impact Nulls have on query performance, aggregations, design, storage and much more. While this […]
administration / Azure / MSSQL
Auto Update Statistics when does it occur
I was recently asked when does the actual Auto Update Stats trigger and while I know its during query compile I wasn’t exactly sure what the thresholds were […]
TRACE FLAG 1118 – Proportional Filling and the tempdb
Often when conducting trainings I ask my participants not to take my word for it but try things out for themselves. I was asked a question about the […]
Stress testing disk subsystems – SQLIOSIM
A client of ours recently bought a brand new set of disks and wanted to know best practices around tempdb optimizations during the discussion we were trying to […]
IS IT POSSIBLE? Bulk operations in Full recovery model
Here is the reason I am writing this post As per the above entry from MSDN, there cannot be any minimally logged operations in full recovery mode, which […]
Uninstalling SQL Server
I just realized today that I had the CTP for sql 2014 still installed on my laptop today. While trying to uninstall it from control panel (time period […]
Clustered Index vs Unique Non Clustered Index, which is better performance while still maintaining integrity of the data?
At a training recently we were talking about improving ETL performance for a process that loads about 3 million rows. While the answer is typically to load the […]