I learned a long time ago, that the quickest way to do something was to not do it at all. A friend of mine asked me if I could review an update statement that was confounding their group looking for ways to optimize it. The table has, just short of 50 columns, a considerable number of indexes and the column in question, has a datatype set to NVarChar(8), consists of some numbers, combinations of letters and numbers, etc. The process would take 7 ½ hours to run this update, as it parses through 100K rows at a time. There is…
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So Tracy Boggiano told me about the great First Responder kit that Brent Ozar had available to use with sp_Blitz using Power BI desktop for a UI, but that it was really slow to non-responsive as data grew. As this was focused on performance data and also included my new love of Power BI, I asked to take a look at it. Tracy was kind enough to send me a copy of her database and the support files for the responder kit and I finally had time to look into it this week. We won’t discuss how I managed to…
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After my AWR Warehouse session at DOAG in Nuremberg, Germany last week, an attendee asked me if he really needed to use trace files anymore with the value provided by AWR, (Automatic Workload Repository) and ASH, (Active Session History.) I responded that trace files were incredibly valuable and should never be discounted. To use an analogy, when I was 22 years old, and entered a doctor’s office missing a small percentage of my visual field after an apparent migraine, doctors used a number of different “tools” at their disposal in an attempt to diagnose what had happened. They first started…