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Off Topic: Charity and snooker

January 17, 2019

So this will be a very unusual post for this blog. It will be completely off topic. One of the things I do in my spare time is to play snooker. Mind you, I am not good at the game. But I enjoy it, and it’s a nice break from sitting at my laptop. Marathon So why do I share this tidbit about my personal life? Why do I think anyone cares? The reason is that I need some help. Next month, on February 15 and 16, 2019, I am participating in a 24-hour snooker marathon. And with my participation…

T-SQL Tuesday #110 – “Automate All the Things”

January 8, 2019

Hugo Kornelis

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It is once more the second Tuesday of the month, better known as T-SQL Tuesday. This month, we got our writing assignment from Garry Bargsley (b|t). He asks us to write about automation: what automation are we proud of or do we want to complete, and using what technology? However, I found that I was more triggered by the title of his request post than by the content, so I’ll allow myself the liberty of applying a very loose interpretation of the topic. All the things? Garry titled his invitation “Automate All the Things”, and I plagiarized that title because…

Looking back to 2018

December 31, 2018

Hugo Kornelis

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We are approaching the end of 2018. It is December 30 as I start writing this (I’ll probably finish and publish it December 31), traditionally a time to look back at the past year. I often refrain from doing what everybody does because a certain date is on the calendar (my dad would sigh and suggest that I’m still not over puberty, and he’d probably be right). But in this case I’ll make an exception. For me, 2018 was mainly the year I started building my own website. The site where I publish my blog posts, but more important: the…

Plansplaining, part 9. Recursive CTEs

December 3, 2018

Hugo Kornelis

I had to skip three months, but finally it is here: part eight of the plansplaining series. Each of these posts takes an execution plan with an interesting pattern, and details exactly how that plan works. I am pretty sure that (almost) everyone reading this blog knows that a CTE (Common Table Expression) is an independent subquery that can be named and then referenced (multiple times if needed) in the main query. This makes CTEs an invaluable tool to increase the readability of complex queries. Almost everything we can do with a CTE can equally well be done by using…

More information in execution plans

November 12, 2018

Hugo Kornelis

Troubleshoorting performance issues can be hard. Having as much information available at our fingertips does not magically make this easier but it does at least save us the burden of having to collect that information from other places. That’s why I like how much extra information Microsoft has been adding to execution plans in recent releases. During this year’s PASS Summit, I went to a session presented by Pedro Lopes and Joe Sack. Pedro explained in his half of the session that Microsoft has the goal of making sure that everything we need for troubleshooting will be available in the…

T-SQL Tuesday #106: How to use triggers and not be sad

September 11, 2018

Hugo Kornelis

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The T-SQL Tuesday subject for September, chosen by Steve Jones (b|t), is to write about an experience I had with triggers. I decided to apply a very loose interpretation of his assignment and write more about triggers in general. Undeserved hate My very first SQL Server related job was quite unusual. I was added to a team that developed software using a code generator. We had to define business rules (such as constraints and derivation rules) on top of a conceptual information model for the company. The tool would then generate T-SQL code to support and implement those rules. The…

The best execution plan book ever written

September 10, 2018

Hugo Kornelis

It all started back in 2012 – yes, six years ago! That was when I was first asked if I wanted to be the technical reviewer for Grant Frtichey’s book on execution plans. I obviously said yes … and then a lot of time passed because first Grant was busy, then we decided to wait for the SQL Server 2014 changes to become clear, and then yet other things intervened. Actual work started just over three years ago. If I had known back then that it would take this long, that I would spend so much time on this book,…

T-SQL Tuesday #105: Brick walls

August 14, 2018

Hugo Kornelis

It’s the second Tuesday of August already, and that means it’s T-SQL Tuesday time. This month’s topic, chosen by Wayne Sheffield (b|t), is to write about brick walls we ran into and how we dealt with the situation. Thinking about this topic, I remembered two moments in my career where I really was stuck … and then got unstuck in two very different ways. The unconscious solution The first event I want to share took place a long time ago. It was early in my career, my first programming job in fact. My job was to maintain and improve some…

Plansplaining, part 8. To join the impossible join

August 6, 2018

Hugo Kornelis

This is part eight 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 query that, given the known limitations of the available join operators, appears to be impossible to execute. But it’s a legal query so it should run. And it does. But how? Sample query The query below can be executed in any version of the AdventureWorks sample database. Don’t bother understanding the logic, there is none. It is merely constructed to show how SQL Server handles what…

My thoughts on session levels

July 25, 2018

Hugo Kornelis

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…

Off Topic: Charity and snooker

T-SQL Tuesday #110 – “Automate All the Things”

Looking back to 2018

Plansplaining, part 9. Recursive CTEs

More information in execution plans

T-SQL Tuesday #106: How to use triggers and not be sad

The best execution plan book ever written

T-SQL Tuesday #105: Brick walls

Plansplaining, part 8. To join the impossible join

My thoughts on session levels

T-SQL Tuesday #135 – My tools to stay alive

Plansplaining, part 16. Temporal tables (part 1)

T-SQL Tuesday #136 – Float does NOT suck!

Plansplaining, part 17. Temporal tables (part 2)

T-SQL Tuesday #137 – Use notebooks every day? No way!

Execution Plan Video Training – Announcing the next block

Execution plans – learning opportunities

How a row goal affects estimates

T-SQL Tuesday #138 – Keeping up with change

Recorded session: Debugging without debugger

Hugo Kornelis

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