Year: 2018

SQLSaturday NL #790

WillemLeenen Uncategorized

Right before the saturday, Microsoft announced the withdrawal of their support of SQLsaturdays. What would this mean for the next events? I couldn’t find an official statement from Microsoft to share, but the message came across: SQLserver isn’t hot anymore. The real bets are on different cards, such as Artificial Intelligence and Big data.

But nothing of this impending doom on that sunny saturday. We were offered 35 sessions on subjects ranging from Business Intelligence, Azure, AI & Machine learning, performance,  specific subjects such as “U-SQL custom extractor for multi-gigabyte XML” and reminders that we should learn about powershell ( “dbachecks – The PowerShell Module to validate your SQL Estate”) or Extended Events (“Simplifying XEvents Management with dbatools”) .

A new kid on this block is GDPR. Privacy is well valued in this new law, so far so good,but implementing this law is a complex task with unknown unkowns on the way. Even Brent Ozar freaked out and doesn’t sell his services to inhabitants of europe anymore. “GDPR, A European Horror Story” by John Martin gave a nice overview of the problems to follow. He urged us to follow the recent news about Apollo.io, a spamfactory sales engagement startup, whose breach this summer may lead to the first serious testcase of GDPR after Europeans found their data back via haveibeenpwned.com.

 

Book review: SQL Query store in Action

WillemLeenen Uncategorized

SQL Query store in Action
“A deep dive into the details on the query store”
By Grant Fritchey

This is a book about the Query store that would “change the way you monitor performance … and the way you tune the performance..”
Well, not so. This isn’t a book at all; this is merely a blogpost that has been put on paper.

For example, you have unreadable screendumps accompanied with the text :
“( you might have to click here to make it bigger)”

You will also see several pages of SQL code, for you to cut and paste – pardon, to type into management studio for an hour or so. Or search the web for the original post. The blogposts themselves are well written with clear questions and very verbose experiments, with an occasional reference to the source with a hyperlink. A hyperlink? Yes, a printed hyperlink.

 

 

Pages of Code to Type….

This book is not about the internals and the elaborate posts are to answer
questions such as:

What happens to Plan Forcing when you have RECOMPILE hint in your procs?
– Answer: nothing, a full recompile is done, that plan is discarded and the forced plan is used.

What happens with a forced plan when “Optimized for Ad Hoc” is configured?
– Answer: this may capture many plans, so change the capture behaviour from “All” to “automatic” . This will filter the input to the query store and avoid flooding the query store.

Which takes precedence, the Query Store force plan or a plan guide?
answer: Query Store

Interesting details, but more striking are the subjects that are missing from the book.

Overall verdict:
This printed blog with trivia about the query store will hardly speed up your research.
Keep your money and save the trees – in the case, a bonsai.