Enabling compression on your database can save you a lot of space – but when you have a lot of varchar(max) or nvarchar(max) data, you may find the savings to be limited. This is because only data stored on the data and index pages is compressed, and data for the (max) data types is generally stored on other, special-purpose pages – either text/image pages, or row overflow data pages. (See Understanding Pages and Extents in Books Online). This is from the SQL Server 2008R2 Books Online, but it is still valid in SQL Server 2012 – but apparently, this page…

As promised, here are the slide deck and demo code I used for my presentation at the Bleeding Edge 2012 conference in Laško, Slovenia. Okay, I promised to have them up by Tuesday or Wednesday at worst, and it is now Saturday – my apologies for the delay. Thanks again to all the attendees of my session. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you have any question then please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me. I had a great time in Slovenia, both during the event and in the after hours. Even if everything the tour guide…

As some of you might know, I have been to SQLRally Nordic 2012 in Copenhagen earlier this week. I was able to attend many interesting sessions, I had a great time catching up with old friends and meeting new people, and I was allowed to present a session myself. I understand that the PowerPoint slides and demo code I used in my session will be made available through the SQLRally website – but I don’t know how long it will take the probably very busy volunteers to do so. And I promised my attendees to make them available through my…

Scalar user-defined functions are bad for performance. I already showed that for T-SQL scalar user-defined functions without and with data access, and for most CLR scalar user-defined functions without data access, and in this blog post I will show that CLR scalar user-defined functions with data access fit into that picture. First attempt Sticking to my simplistic example of finding the triple of an integer value by reading it from a pre-populated lookup table and following the standard recommendations and templates that Microsoft publishes for CLR scalar table-valued functions, my first attempt for this function looked like this: [Microsoft.SqlServer.Server.SqlFunction(DataAccess=DataAccessKind.Read,    …

I have a very busy time ahead of me, with lots of travel, lots of speaking engagements, and hence lots of opportunity to meet and catch up with what has become known as the SQL Family. (An excellent term, by the way – it describes exactly how it has always felt to me!) So, for everyone who want to know when and where they can meet me (as well as for everyone who wants to make sure to stay as far away from me as possible), here is my schedule for the rest of the year, in chronological order: ·…

I showed why T-SQL scalar user-defined functions are bad for performance in two previous posts. In this post, I will show that CLR scalar user-defined functions are bad as well (though not always quite as bad as T-SQL scalar user-defined functions). I will admit that I had not really planned to cover CLR in this series. But shortly after publishing the first part, I received an email from Adam Machanic, which basically said that I should make clear that the information in that post does not apply to CLR functions. So I dutifully added a comment to that post, and…

In a previous blog post, I demonstrated just how much you can hurt your performance by encapsulating expressions and computations in a user-defined function (UDF). I focused on scalar functions that didn’t include any data access. In this post, I will complete the discussion on scalar UDFs by covering the effect of data access in a scalar UDF. Note that, like the previous post, this all applies to T-SQL user-defined functions only. SQL Server also supports CLR user-defined functions (written in a .Net language like C# or VB.Net); those are not in the scope of this blog post. Data access…

So you thought that encapsulating code in user-defined functions for easy reuse is a good idea? Think again! SQL Server supports three types of user-defined functions. Only one of them qualifies as good. The other two – well, the title says it all, doesn’t it? The bad: scalar functions A scalar user-defined function (UDF) is very much like a stored procedure, except that it always returns a single value of a predefined data type – and because of that property, it isn’t invoked with an EXECUTE statement, but embedded in an expression where the returned value is immediately used. I…

In 1994, I learned a method for data modeling that is based on three principles. I immediately knew that these principles should embraced by anyone who does any data modeling or process modeling. Or almost any other job, for that matter. I have described these principles in three previous blog posts: the Jargon Principle, the Concreteness Principle, and the Reproducibility Principle. But I have later found that there are more principles and guidelines that are important to keep in mind when modeling. Avoid Redundancy I almost hear you think: “Yes, avoid redundancy. Duh! Do you have any more open doors…

The optimizer is the part of SQL Server that takes your query and reorders and rearranges your query to find the optimal execution plan. In theory. In practice, that doesn’t always work out well. Often, the optimizer manages to come up with brilliant ways to execute a complex query very efficiently – but sometimes, it misses an option that appears to be so simple that you can only stare in utter amazement at the execution plan before going to the Connect site. Here is an example I recently ran into. I tested it on SQL Server 2012 and on SQL…