Allen Kinsel, my brother in arms for the Summit 2010 Program, posed a question about how to grow the pool of speakers for the PASS 2010 Summit. Allen has proposed that in order to bring in more speakers, we limit things to 1 session per speaker. With 168 sessions across the board, that’s a lot [...]
A lot of people use calendar tables. I’ve blogged about it before. They’re incredibly helpful. Now, have you ever needed a table of minutes?
You’re probably asking, “Jeremiah, why the heck would I ever need a table of minutes?” Well, dear reader, I’m going to tell you that. Please stop interrupting.
Let’s say you have a report. [...]
Putting functions in the where clause of a SQL Statement can cause performance problems. If you aren’t careful, these problems can add up and bring a powerful production system to its knees.
For this example, I’m using the Northwind database, but you could do this on any database.
The first thing to do is put an index [...]
Refactoring SQL code can be pretty easy. Just like refactoring any other programming language, sometimes you have to look around to find the culprit.
We have a slow running query that frequently times out when run by the users. A quick look at the query told me what was wrong. I found this clause in the [...]
Execution plans are great things. They give us an insight into how SQL Server is putting together queries and why they run slowly.
One immediate thing I look for in an execution plan is a Key Lookup. In a Key Lookup operation, SQL Server has to reference the clustered index on the table because a value [...]
