Skip to content
Home » Learn » Page 8

Learn

Science FTW!

Planning to Increase Cost Threshold for Parallelism – Like a Smart Person!

When administrating a SQL Server instance with multiple CPU cores and heavy workload, it’s common to see SQL Server creating and using execution plans with parallelism. The instance configuration “cost threshold for parallelism” is what determines for SQL Server the minimum sub-tree cost before it starts considering to create a parallelism plan. The default “out-of-the-box” value of this configuration is 5.

However, in some cases, we would want to increase the default configuration of “cost threshold for parallelism” to something higher than the Microsoft default of 5, thus decreasing the frequency in which SQL Server creates parallelism plans.

Read More »Planning to Increase Cost Threshold for Parallelism – Like a Smart Person!

Let SQL Server Write Code for You

A lot of DBAs would spend hours (and even days) sitting in front of their computer to write a stupendous amount of lines of code… Then take care of a lot of copy-paste and typing errors… Test the code and find errors… Fix the code… Run it again… And so on. All the while having to navigate within a huge forest of code.

I would presume that it doesn’t take a special kind of mind to stand up and say “just hold on a minute! Why am I working so hard with this mundane task?? Why can’t SQL Server do all of this for me??”

Because in fact… It can!

Read More »Let SQL Server Write Code for You

Efficiently UPDATE and DELETE using TOP and ORDER BY

Since SQL Server 2005, Microsoft had a nice addition to the common DML statements, UPDATE and DELETE, by allowing the use of the TOP keyword. Well, SQL Server 2019 has just been released, and yet unfortunately for many of us, SQL Server still doesn’t support the use of the TOP keyword in direct combination with the ORDER BY clause. So when we do need to update or delete the top x rows in a table based on a specific order, we’re bound to use all kinds of workarounds.

However, many of the commonly used workarounds are not as efficient as they can be.

Read More »Efficiently UPDATE and DELETE using TOP and ORDER BY