Entries Published On August, 2012
Generating a Database Clean Up Script
Below is a script I recently used on a project to dynamically generate and execute the statements needed to clear all the data out of a database. It is heavily borrowed from a blog post by Nikola Ilijev. I just added the parts pertaining to the dropping and re-creating of the ColumnStore index objects and …
SQL Server 2012 Certification Path
Regardless of your opinion on Microsoft certifications, when you work for a Microsoft partner company, you are typically encouraged to get certified in your area of expertise and stay current. So now that SQL 2012 has been out for a few months, implementations are picking up speed, official exams have been released from beta, and …
Filter Enhancements in PerformancePoint Services 2013
On a previous project, there was quite a bit of PerformancePoint dashboard work. A few of the dashboards contained a large multi-select nested filter with a ton of items to choose from. Once the dashboards were published, some of the users began voicing their frustrations with having to dig through this filter to find all the previously …
Performance Tuning with OPTIMIZE FOR UNKNOWN
Today I ran into a performance/scalability problem with a group of stored procs I’d written earlier this week. All the procs passed basic unit-testing, but once I increased the load from processing 100 records to 100,000 records…you know, to make sure it scales and stuff…the test went from < 3 seconds to over 35 minutes!! …
ColumnStores vs. RowStores: I/O Performance and Compression
One of the major benefits associated with ColumnStore indexes is increased I/O performance. Below are two of the more common explanations for this bump in I/O performance… ColumnStores only retrieve data (from storage) necessary to satisfy the query This notion is inherent in the column-oriented architecture…data pages in column-oriented storage only contain data from a single …
ColumnStores vs. RowStores: How Different Are They Really?
For the vast majority of SQL Server professionals, it wasn’t until earlier this year, with the release of SQL Server 2012, that concept of “ColumnStore” (as opposed to RowStore) popped up on the radar. And now, as part of the research for a current project, I’m trying to find details on Microsoft’s implementation of the ColumnStore index…but since …
Diving Into the Deep End with ColumnStore Indexes
Currently, I’m working with a client to develop a custom database application that will be used for tracking and reporting on account receivables. We have estimated between 2-3 billion transactions per year and need to maintain 3 years of history…so it will be a fairly large database. But more interesting that the sheer size of …
Static Code Analysis and SARG-ability
This morning while coding a stored procedure for a SQL Server 2012 SSDT project in Visual Studio, I noticed an interesting little blue squiggly under one of the column references in the WHERE-clause of the statement I was working on. Curiously, I hovered the mouse over it and was pleasantly surprised to see the following …