All the execution plans are estimated plans. All of them. There fundamentally isn't any such thing as an "Actual" plan. Where Do You Get Execution Plans? There are a lot of sources for execution plans. You can capture them using extended events (or, if you must, trace). You can capture them through the Management Studio gui. You can also capture them from the SQL Operations Studio gui. You can query the cache through the DMVs and pull them in that way. You can look at plans in query store. All these resources, yet, for any given query, all the plans will be identical (assuming no recompile at work). Why? Because they're all the same plan. Each and every one of them is an estimated plan. Only an estimated plan. This…
Wait statistics are a vital part of understanding what is causing your system to run slowly. Capturing them can be done through a variety of mechanisms from sys.dm_os_wait_stats (use this query for that) to sys.dm_db_wait_stats in Azure SQL Database. Those cover the system and the database, however, what about capturing query wait statistics on a specific query? Query Wait Statistics There was a time when this was actually kind of difficult. However, now we have a lot of different tools to capture query wait statistics. First up, and really, one of the best and easiest ways to deal with this, is to use the wait statistics captured by the Query Store. The only drawback to this method is that it is an aggregation of query wait statistics for the given…
Capturing query execution metrics is much easier now that you can see the runtime metrics in execution plans when you're using SQL Server 2016 SP1 or better in combination with SQL Server Management Studio 2017. When you capture an actual plan (using any method), you get the query execution time on the server as well as wait statistics and I/O for the query. Fundamentally, this changes how we can go about query tuning. Runtime Metrics To see these runtime metrics in action, let's start with a query: SELECT p.LastName, pp.PhoneNumber, pnt.Name FROM Person.Person AS p JOIN Person.PersonPhone AS pp ON pp.BusinessEntityID = p.BusinessEntityID JOIN Person.PhoneNumberType AS pnt ON pnt.PhoneNumberTypeID = pp.PhoneNumberTypeID WHERE pnt.PhoneNumberTypeID = 3; We'll run this query and capture the Actual Execution Plan using SSMS 2017. The changes…
The winner is: Everyone. Hey, the challenge was random. I didn't promise a prize or a winner. Instead, I suggested everyone blog based on an image of the great Tom Baker: In no particular order we have: Persist and Aggregate Index Stats Across Server Restarts by Eric Cobb Nice use of the image, incorporating it into an interesting technical post on how to persist your index usage stats. Useful information since this DMV is reset when you restart the server (or fail it over or...). Good technical blog on a useful topic, data about your system. Working with SQLSaturday SpeedPass by Wayne Sheffield +10,000 points for both using the image well and for the PowerShell. -10,000 points for making me comment on a post about PASS (I'm the EVP of…
Data Definition Language queries don't go through the optimizer, right? While normally, my short answer to this question in the past would have been, yes. However, with testing comes knowledge and I want to be sure about the statement. I'm working with a team of people to completely rewrite the SQL Server Execution Plans book. We'll probably be published in April or May. It's going to be amazing. The structure will be completely different and the book will represent five years of additional knowledge in how execution plans work and how to read and interpret them since the last book was written. However, enough on that. Let's answer the question about Data Definition Language. First of all, we need to quickly define our terms. Data Definition Language (DDL) represents the syntax for queries that build…
[caption id="attachment_2548" align="alignleft" width="300"] Tired from all those blog posts[/caption] For my final blog post in the #gettingstarted, #iwanttohelp series, I decided to curate a set of presentations from the PASS Virtual Chapters. This content is available online. It's free. Most importantly for the person just getting started as a SQL Server data pro, it's good. I'm going to marry each of the presentations with my eleven blog posts in this series. The Importance of a Full Backup in SQL Server For this one I'm going to recommend Tim Radney's session Understanding SQL Server Backup and Restore. I know Tim personally and guarantee this is a good session. Why Is The Server Slow Jes Borland is a very close personal friend and an absolutely outstanding presenter (and person). She has…
So you want to do some tuning, but you're not sure how to test a query on it's performance. Not a problem. Here's a very rough script that I use to do some recent testing. This script to test a query is post #11 of the #enterylevel #iwanttohelp effort started by Tim Ford (b|t). Read about it here. The Script The goal here is to load a bunch of parameter values from one table and then use those values to run a query to test it. To do this I connect up to my SQL Server instance, naturally. Then I retrieve the values I'm interested in. I set up the query I want to test. Finally a loop through the data set, calling the query once for each value. [reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo") | out-null #…
The things you read on the internet, for example, "don't use a sub-query because that hurts performance." Truly? Where do people get these things? Let's Test It I've written before about the concept of cargo cult data professionals. They see one issue, one time, and consequently extrapolate that to all issues, all the time. It's the best explanation I have for why someone would suggest that a sub-query is flat out wrong and will hurt performance. Let me put a caveat up front (which I will reiterate in the conclusion, just so we're clear), there's nothing magically good about sub-queries just like there is nothing magically evil about sub-queries. You can absolutely write a sub-query that performs horribly, does horrible things, runs badly, and therefore absolutely screws up your system. Just as…
I read all the time how SELECT * hurts performance. I even see where people have said that you just have to supply a column list instead of SELECT * to get a performance improvement. Let's test it, because I think this is bunkum. The Test I have here two queries: SELECT * FROM Warehouse.StockItemTransactions AS sit; --and SELECT sit.StockItemTransactionID, sit.StockItemID, sit.TransactionTypeID, sit.CustomerID, sit.InvoiceID, sit.SupplierID, sit.PurchaseOrderID, sit.TransactionOccurredWhen, sit.Quantity, sit.LastEditedBy, sit.LastEditedWhen FROM Warehouse.StockItemTransactions AS sit; I'm basically going to run this a few hundred times each from PowerShell. I'll capture the executions using Extended Events and we'll aggregate the results. The Results I ran the test multiple times because, funny enough, I kept seeing some disparity in the results. One test would show a clear bias for one method, another test would…
I love the Query Store. Seriously. It’s a huge leap forward in the capabilities of Azure SQL Database and SQL Server in support of performance monitoring and query optimization. One of my favorite aspects of the Query Store is the ability to force plans. Frankly though, it’s also the scariest part of the Query Store. I do believe that plan forcing will be one of the most ill-used functions in SQL Server since the multi-statement table-valued user-defined function (don’t get me started). However, unlike the UDF, this ill-use will be because of poor understanding on the part of the user, not a fundamental design issue. No, plan forcing and the Query Store are very well constructed. Let me give you an example of just how well constructed they are. Let’s…