May 2006 - Posts

• The Perils of Multi-valued logic

  Perils of NULL usage: I know there is a religious war about the use of NULLs and I don’t want to go down that path. But about 10 years ago I worked for another one of Bill Gate’s companies and I had to prepare a sales report for him from our database. Read More... Posted Tuesday, May 30, 2006 4:43 PM by mssqlisv | 0 Comments

• SQL 2000 SP4 behavior change when using API cursors to be aware of.

  A few customers and ISVs who’ve applied SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4 (SP4) have observed degradation in performance. While there could be many causes that may result in performance degradation, there is one change introduced in SP4 which has been particularly Read More... Posted Thursday, May 18, 2006 2:16 PM by mssqlisv | 0 Comments

• SQL Optimizations - Manual Update statistics on small tables may provide a big impact.

  Problem: When I analyzed a performance problem in an ISV data warehouse solution running on SQL Server 2000 I figured out that the query plan of a star join (join between a huge fact table and a bunch of small dimension tables) didn't look right. Further Read More... Posted Thursday, May 11, 2006 4:50 PM by mssqlisv | 7 Comments

• SQL Optimizations – A well concealed transform that can cut that much needed millisecond out of your query.

  SQL Server Optimizer is full of surprises… Optimizer uses many transformations to find the best possible path of execution. One of those happen in cases where you do a query that looks like the following; -- displays the duration, cpu, reads, writes and Read More... Posted Friday, May 05, 2006 1:56 PM by mssqlisv | 2 Comments