Month: July 2018

My thoughts on session levels

Almost every conference I go to, either as speaker or as an attendee, indicates the level of sessions. Sometimes this is done with a description (beginner / intermediate / advanced), more often with a number (typically 100 – 200 – 300 – 400 – 500, though I have seen other scales as well). This is obviously a good thing to do. If you are just new in the field, attending a highly advanced session would be a waste of time. And if you have many years of experience then you will probably not learn much from a beginner-level session. But…

T-SQL Tuesday #104: Make Ola backup BizTalk

In 2009, Adam Machanic (b|t) started the monthly blog event known as T-SQL Tuesday. One person picks a topic, and everyone is invited to blog about it on the second Tuesday of the month. The July 2018 host is Bert Wagner (b|t), and his chosen topic is: Code You Would Hate To Live Without. Talk about a broad topic! I could fill a book on that topic, and the same probably goes for many others. But since my time is limited, I have decided to cherry-pick just two of my favorite scripts. This post is about the second: a small…

T-SQL Tuesday #104 (part 1): sp_metasearch

In 2009, Adam Machanic (b|t) started the monthly blog event known as T-SQL Tuesday. One person picks a topic, and everyone is invited to blog about it on the second Tuesday of the month. The July 2018 host is Bert Wagner (b|t), and his chosen topic is: Code You Would Hate To Live Without. Talk about a broad topic! I could fill a book on that topic, and the same probably goes for many others. But since my time is limited, I have decided to cherry-pick just two of my favorite scripts. This post is about the first: sp_metasearch. Impact…

Plansplaining, part 7. The Constant Scan that returns no data

This is part seven of the plansplaining series. Each of these posts takes an execution plan with an interesting pattern, and details exactly how that plan works. In this post we look at a deceptively simple query: a simple SELECT with an ISNULL to show either a row returned or a placeholder value. And yet there is more going on under the covers than one might expect. Sample query The query below can be executed in any version of the AdventureWorks sample database. It returns a code string representing the version number on the 2016 and 2017 versions; on older…

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