Over the past month I’ve been playing around with the new In-Memory OLTP (code name: “Hekaton”) features within SQL Server 2014 CTP2. My organization is all about low latency applications, and this is one feature of SQL Server that I need to get familiar with ASAP. To do this, I started my own little project that takes an existing database and converts parts of it into in-memory tables. Once that step is complete, I could work on rewriting the TSQL code. It might seem fairly simple, but with every new feature of SQL Server there are usually limitations. And one...
Continue reading...TSQL Tuesday #47 – Your Best SQL Server SWAG
The host for T-SQL Tuesday #47 is Kendal Van Dyke (blog|twitter), and his topic of choice is about the best SQL Server SWAG we ever received at a conference; specifically, the “good stuff”. I’ve been doing a lot of work with SQL Server over the years, but I’ve only had the opportunity to attend the big conferences a few times. As a matter of fact, next week will be my first time attending the SQL PASS Summit. We’re supposed to talk about the “good stuff” and not any of the “cheap tchotchkes” that are given away by the vendors, but...
Continue reading...One Year Later
Wow! It’s been one year since I launched my blog, and my how things have changed. Accomplishments Over the Past Year I’ve had a chance to interact with a lot of people relating to many of the posts on my blog, and even run into a few people that said “Hey I know you through your blog”. I’ve gotten much more involved in the #sqlfamily through Twitter, Stackexchange, as well as through my local SQL Server user group. Although I’ve attended meetings at my local group off and on over the past several years, I am now making a specific...
Continue reading...The Case of the NULL Query_Plan
As a DBA, we’re often asked to troubleshoot performance issues for stored procedures. One of the most common tools at our disposal is the query execution plan cached in memory by SQL Server. Once we have the query plan, we can dissect what SQL Server is doing and hopefully find some places for improvement. Grabbing the actual XML query plan for a stored procedure from the cache is fairly easy using the following query. From this point, we can open the XML query plan in Management Studio or Plan Explorer to start our investigation. But what happens if SQL Server...
Continue reading...How to Tell If Your Users are Connecting to the Availability Group Listener
You’ve spent a lot of time planning and building out a new SQL Server 2012 environment complete with Availability Group Listeners, but how can you be sure the end users are connecting to the listener and not directly to the SQL Server instance? So why would we care about this? To begin with, if the users are not connecting to the listener, then upon a failover to another replica, those users would have to connect to a different SQL Server instance name. Having a single point of connection is crucial for the high availability process to work correctly. In a...
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