Recently we had a requirement that was caused by a very unique situation. A table with a column of datatype nvarchar(max) was inadvertently populated with some text in […]
Analyze Actual Execution Plan in SSMS
This might be a hidden gem in SSMS that most people aren’t aware of so I figured I would post about it. I recently used this feature to […]
Plan reuse under Simple parameterization
Interesting problem came up today on #sqlhelp. A trivial plan results in multiple prepared Execution plans. To begin with let’s understand parameterization quickly. It is a mechanism that […]
Snapshot isolation level when database is set to read only.
Recently there was a question posted on #sqlhelp about why a database switched to Snapshot isolation level when you make it read only and then reverts back to […]
Cannot use row granularity hint on the table
Got approached with the below error message recently and thought it might be an interesting problem to look into. ProgrammingError((\’42000\’, 651, \'[Microsoft][SQL Server Native Client 11.0][SQL Server]Cannot use […]
#sqlhelp | should you remove indexes from tables before ETL?
Starting today we are introducing a new type of blog content which covers questions from #sqlhelp. We pick random questions from the feed and try to cover them […]
Can we use in-memory oltp instead of columnstore index for DW queries
Recently when having a chat with a client I was asked if it will be a good idea to replace a view with a static in memory table […]
Scaling SQL Express with Stretch table feature
Recently I was asked by a client if the Stretch table feature will work with SQL Express and if so what the limitations are. This seemed like an […]
Weird ways I explain seemingly complicated SQL topics
Over the years I have accumulated some seemingly weird ways to explain topics within SQL Server. Usually in a training I find that participants are able to relate […]
Rebuild all indexes and statistics on Azure SQL database
Since Azure SQL databases are limited in what they expose to the management studio client we miss out on a lot of features within SSMS that we could […]