Erin Stellato of SQLskills takes a deep look into the I/O impact of running DBCC CHECKCONSTRAINTS, including explaining why some check methods may consume a lot more I/O than others.
Continue Reading »Feb 282013
Feb 252013
I had a great time at the MVP Summit last week. Caught up with a lot of friends, tried some new foods (including Tempura Fried Kurobuta Bacon), and took in some great technical sessions.
Continue Reading »Feb 222013
Paul Randal of SQLskills continues his series on maintaining happy and healthy transaction logs in SQL Server, this time focusing on configuration issues that can lead to less than optimal performance.
Continue Reading »Feb 202013
The Halloween Problem has a number of important consequences for SQL Server execution plans. In this final part of the series, we look at some of the tricks the optimizer uses to avoid adding an Eager Table Spool to every update query that might encounter the Halloween Problem.
Continue Reading »Feb 182013
The MERGE statement (introduced in SQL Server 2008) allows us to perform a mixture of INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE operations using a single declarative statement. The Halloween Protection issues for MERGE are, logically enough, mostly a combination of the requirements for the individual operations performed, but there are some important differences and a couple of optimizations that apply only to MERGE.
Feb 152013
In the first part of this series, we saw how the Halloween Problem applies to UPDATE queries. In this post, we will see how the same underlying issue can affect INSERT and DELETE statements.
Feb 132013
Much has been written over the years about understanding and optimizing SELECT queries, but rather less about data modification. This series of posts looks at an issue that is specific to INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and MERGE queries – the Halloween Problem.
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