In my previous post on streamlining the operations of the transaction log, I discussed two of the most common causes of extra log records being generated: dead weight from unused nonclustered indexes and page split operations (that cause index fragmentation). Assuming you’ve read that post, I mentioned that there are more subtle problems that can be detrimental to transaction log performance, and I’m going to cover these here.
Continue Reading »Earlier in this series (Part 1 | Part 2) we talked about generating a series of numbers using various techniques. While interesting, and useful in some scenarios, a more practical application is to generate a series of contiguous dates; for example, a report that requires showing all the days of a month, even if some days had no transactions.
Continue Reading »In my previous post, I talked about ways to generate a sequence of contiguous numbers from 1 to 1,000. Now I'd like to talk about the next levels of scale: generating sets of 50,000 and 1,000,000 numbers.
Continue Reading »There are many use cases for generating a sequence of values in SQL Server. I'm not talking about a persisted IDENTITY column (or the new SEQUENCE in SQL Server 2012), but rather a transient set to be used only for the lifetime of a query. Or even the simplest cases – such as just appending a row number to each row in a resultset – which might involve adding a ROW_NUMBER() function to the query (or, better yet, in the presentation tier, which has to loop through the results row-by-row anyway).
Many people have implemented ASPState in their environment. Some people use the in-memory option (InProc), but usually I see the database option being used. There are some potential inefficiencies here that you might not notice on low volume sites but that will start to affect performance as your web volume ramps up.
Continue Reading »Since Microsoft revamped the licensing model for SQL Server 2012, it is especially important to do some thoughtful analysis before you decide exactly which processor to use for a database server that will be running SQL Server 2012. The move to core-based licensing for SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition means that a careless decision about precisely what processor you will be running on can cost both a great deal of money and a great deal of performance and scalability.
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