12Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

SQL Saturday New England: The New Date

PASS
The real world can get in the way of important things like SQL Saturday. In the case of SQL Saturday New England, the original date was the same time as the Boston Marathon. Unfortunately, that means that Boston's somewhat limited hotel space will be tweaked. Rather than try to compete with that, we moved the date. Please mark it as April 2nd, 2011.
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04Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey 11 Comments

SQL Saturday in New England

PASS
Adam Machanic (blog|twitter) has put on a SQL Saturday/Data camp event in New England for the last two years. I've helped him both years. It's been very successful. In January we had over 300 attendees, making it one of the larger SQL Saturday events. But, with a single exception (thank you Tim Ford (blog|twitter)), we've only had local speakers. Mind you, we're somewhat lucky with speakers here in New England and have several MVPs and others who are truly excellent when presenting. I'm taking over from Adam to lead the effort for this year, and due to my schedule we're moving the event to the spring sometime. We were thinking about maybe making it the the weekend before SQL Rally. But, I've got a question for all of you who present at SQL Saturday events.…
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04Oct 2010 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

How to Tell if Execution Plans are Reused

SQL Server, T-SQL
I try to watch the search phrases that point people to the blog because sometimes, you get a sense of what problems people are running into. The latest question or phrase I've seen a lot lately is along the lines of "how do you know if an execution plan is being reused." Since compiling an execution plan can be an extremely expensive operation, it's worth your time to understand how well a given plan is getting reused. If you've seen me present, I'll frequently talk about the application that had a query with an 86 table join. Recompiles on that thing were frequent and extremely costly. The only good news was, they were recompiles. If we weren't getting plan reuse it would have been an even worse system than it was. There are…
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27Sep 2010 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Parameter Name Size And Performance

SQL Server, T-SQL
I saw an odd statement the other day, "The size of the name of the parameter does not affect performance." My first thought was, "Well, duh!" But then, I had one of those, "Ah, but are you sure" thoughts. And you know what, I wasn't sure. If size of the parameter name did affect performance, I figured, the one sure place where that would be evident is in the size of the execution plan. Right? I mean, if there was an impact on memory, and hence on performance, that's probably where you'd see evidence of it. I wrote two queries: DECLARE @ThisIsAVeryVeryLongParameterNameThatIsTrulyRidiculousButItIllustratesThePointThatParameterLengthDoesNotAffectPerformance int SET @ThisIsAVeryVeryLongParameterNameThatIsTrulyRidiculousButItIllustratesThePointThatParameterLengthDoesNotAffectPerformance = 572 SELECT soh.SalesOrderID ,sod.SalesOrderDetailID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS soh JOIN Sales.SalesOrderDetail AS sod ON soh.SalesOrderID = sod.SalesOrderID WHERE soh.SalesOrderID = @ThisIsAVeryVeryLongParameterNameThatIsTrulyRidiculousButItIllustratesThePointThatParameterLengthDoesNotAffectPerformance DECLARE @v int SET…
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20Sep 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

SQL Saturday 46 (#sqlsat46) Recap

PASS
I was privileged to be able to attend and present at SQL Saturday 46 in Raleigh, NC, this last weekend. It was a great collection of people presenting some amazing stuff. I want to say, right off, I think this is the best SQL Saturday event I've been to. I say that despite the fact that I've helped put on a SQL Saturday. I also say that despite the fact that my sample size on SQL Saturday's is fairly low. I've only been to three (including the one I put on). You have to understand, the people who put on #sqlsat46, the Triangle SQL Server Users Group, did an absolutely outstanding job. They had clearly done the early work of getting sponsorships and organizing. This weekend, all that early work…
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07Sep 2010 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Links From Twitter

Misc
Normally, I try to stick to posting technical info or community stuff on the blog, but there were a couple of links from Twitter today that are too good not to share. First, an interesting take from Tom LaRock on the issue around the lack of quality DBA's. He suggests that it's actually a lack of quality managers. Go read it & comment there. Second, this is Not Safe For Work (NSFW). Please, please please understand that before you click on this link. It's a hilarious discussion about NoSql. Put on headphones & give it a listen. Back to your regularly scheduled blog posts...
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03Sep 2010 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

Recursive Hiearchies in Reporting Services

Uncategorized
I am not a Reporting Services guru and nor do I play one on TV. I am however forced to be all things Microsoft Data where I work. So I frequently find myself stretching way beyond my abilities. I just had to get a report running that feeds from a web service and has a recursive hiearchy with customized aggregation on multiple fields with drill down to a different set of details. Yeah, through the internet I can see the SSRS monsters rolling their eyes at the ease of this task. But for us mere mortals it was work. Since I spent so much time learning how to do it, I thought I'd share. XML as a Source First, because we have a very paranoid (and appropriately so) group of…
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30Aug 2010 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

Upcoming Presentations: #24HOP & #SQLSAT46

PASS
Blogging has been a bit quiet of late. That's because I've been spending a lot my spare time getting ready for presentations that I have to give. Two of them are in about two weeks. First, and this one is going to be a big deal, is 24 Hours of Pass: Summit Preview. At the PASS Summit this year I have two spotlight sessions, both on tricks and tools for tuning queries, one on using execution plans and the other on using DMVs. Since the 24HOP presentation is supposed to be a lead-in to the PASS presentations, I decided that before you started tuning queries, you need to know which queries to tune. The presentation is titled: Identifying Costly Queries. I understand there are already nearly 2000 people registered. Let's…
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23Aug 2010 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

PASS Elections

PASS
There are a lot of things I'd like to say about the PASS elections. I was on vacation last week when the news about the slate of candidates broke. I've gone through a lot of emotions thinking about this, which is funny, because, really, what does it matter? But, because of the people, and let's face it, PASS is nothing without the people involved, it does matter. But, I've decided to say as little as possible because I'm not convinced I can add constructively to the conversation and that is what is most needed at this time. First, I want to endorse a few candidates. The people I'm going to endorse, I'm endorsing because I know them personally. I've worked with them, I've talked to them, I've read their stuff.…
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