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  • The 99 Flavours of SQL Server are all Vanilla

    There are so many options for running SQL Server now. It can feel a little intimidating.  You’ve spent years gaining experience with SQL running on Windows Server. On bare metal or in a VM. Locally or in a data centre. Now people are talking about SQL on Linux. SQL on VMs in the cloud. SQL Read more

  • Query Store stores dates as UTC

    One of the powerful aspects of Query Store is the ability to directly query the DMVs for details of historical executions and performance. A key view for this is sys.query_store_runtime_stats (but also sys.query_store_runtime_stats_interval).  If you’re querying these views to look at what was happening during a particular time period then it’s important to understand that Read more

  • Find queries with high memory grants – using Query Store

    I had a server that looked like it had been suffering from memory contention. I wanted to see what queries were being run that had high memory requirements. The problem was that it wasn’t happening right now – I needed to be able to see what had happened over the last 24 hours. Enter Query Read more

  • Adding a Column with a Default Constraint

    Last week a question came up about adding a column to a table, and giving that column a default constraint. Would that default value be assigned to all existing rows, and how much processing would be involved. Unsurprisingly, the answer is that – “it depends”. I’ve got a table with about a million rows that Read more

  • T-SQL Tuesday #114 Puzzle Party – Roundup

    Here’s my round-up for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday. Thanks to everyone who contributed last week. It was great reading your posts and seeing the different ways you interpreted the puzzle theme. We had real-life problems, we had SQL coding questions, we had puzzles, we had solutions, we had games, and we had the imaginarium. Hopefully Read more

  • T-SQL Tuesday #114 – Puzzle Party

    A few years back I started running regular SQL workshops in my workplace. Teaching beginners the basics of querying databases with SQL, as well as more advanced topics for the more advanced. During one session we were discussing the issue of knowledge acquired being quickly lost when people didn’t get the chance to regularly practice Read more