Open Letter to PASS

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As you know, I spoke to 12 Chapter Leaders and 4 Regional Mentors yesterday. All are very upset with PASS right now and feel slighted, which as a volunteer myself, I empathize. I have given the feedback, to you. After talking with them here is where the problem lies IMHO: communication and transparency. We received an email taking away our token of appreciation PASS gives us for all our yearlong hard work that helps to build and amplify this community. In the email we also were asked to please promote and encourage Summit registrations among other things. You cannot take… Continue Reading

What is Batch Mode on Rowstore in SQL Server?

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Under compatibility level 150, in both SQL Server 2019 and Azure SQL Database, you now can use batch mode for CPU-bound analytic type workloads without requiring columnstore indexes. There is no action needed to turn on batch mode aside from being on the proper compatibility mode. You also have the ability to enable it as a database scoped configuration option (as shown below), and you can hint individual queries to either use or not use batch mode (also shown below). If you recall in my earlier blogs on columnstore, it is batch mode in conjunction with page compression that drastically… Continue Reading

My Thoughts on PASS Virtual Summit – An Editorial

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On June 3rd PASS announced their annual Summit for Data Professionals was moved to a virtual format. This is not surprising to those of us in the SQL Server community. Many events are moving to a virtual platform as well as being able to offer them at no costs to all attendees. PASS though, is a different kind of “company” for lack of a better word. We are a community of people that built this “company” from the ground up. Due to normal day to day commitments, like jobs, most of us do not have time to run the day… Continue Reading

The New Public Speaking

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The need to transition to virtual speaking engagements is not easy for me. As someone who loves public speaking and delivering in person training, not being able to do so right now is very difficult. I struggle with staring at my screen talking to my camera as a teaching mechanism. I get asked all the time to speak at virtual user group meeting and online conferences but usually kindly decline. Now that virtual events are our only avenue to speak, I am forcing myself out of my comfort zone and trying a few on for size. There are a several… Continue Reading

Coding Standards Gone Bad in SQL Server

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Knowing your data is very important when it comes to writing code. Now I’ll admit that I am very far from being a developer, however as a DBA, I spend much of my day’s performance tuning code. In doing so, I get to see many ways code can introduce excess database reads. One of the most recent things I have come across has to do with NULLs. The environment I was working in had no default values in their table design, so it was riddled with NULL values. Over the years they had implemented coding standards to try and mitigate… Continue Reading

Moving Your SQL Workload to the Cloud   

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Every day, more IT organizations decide to move their SQL Server databases to Azure. In fact, over a million on-premises SQL Server databases have been moved to Azure. There’s an interesting blog about how Microsoft is faster and cheaper than its competitors that’s worth a read. To assist with your move to Azure Microsoft offers a number of migration tools and services to make this move as smooth as possible which I think attributes to their success. Two of those options are below with some informational links. If you’re migrating a number of large SQL Server instances, Azure Database Migration… Continue Reading

Being a Woman in the SQL Community

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In celebration of Women’s History Month starting next week, I was asked to write this blog about my experiences as a woman in the SQL Community, and it really got me thinking. At first, I thought I should be very politically correct and only talk about the great stuff and hype up all wonderful experiences I’ve had but then I thought that wouldn’t give a true picture. So, I am writing this as openly and honestly as I can. Here it goes. The Ugly I am going to start with the negatives to get those out of the way and… Continue Reading

Upcoming International Speaking Engagements

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I am very excited and fortunate to be chosen to speak at both SQLBits and DataGrillen this year. These two conferences are incredible community run events and if you can attend either of them, I would highly recommend it.  Here’s a little bit about each event and information on how you can register. If you can attend be sure to check out my sessions. SQLBits SQLBits the largest SQL Server conference in Europe, being held in London England March 31st– April 4th. It is a conference for leading data professionals with over 200 sessions from speakers all over the world.… Continue Reading

String Split Function in SQL Server

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Did you know that a native STRING_SPLIT function built into SQL Server was added into SQL Server 2016? As a consultant I see so much code that call out to a scalar function that are used to split out string delimited variables into a usable list. For those that use this method I suggest you look at this function. STRING_SPLIT is a table valued function that returns a single column of your string values split out by the delimiter. This is an unusual bit of T-SQL, in that compatibility level 130 or higher is required for its use (Microsoft didn’t… Continue Reading

Sorting in Stored Procedures – Food for Thought

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We know that sorting can be one of the most expensive things in an execution plan as shown below. However,  we continue to do ORDER BYs repeatedly. Yes, I 100% agree that there is a need to sort a results set and that this should be done in the procedure for good reason, but my concern is having  multiple sorts, erroneous sorts, and the sorts that can be done elsewhere. These are the ones that waste resources and can stifle performance. Many of us writing procedures tend to write in code blocks. We write the SELECT, JOINS, FROMs and WHERES… Continue Reading