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T-SQL Tuesday #128 – Learn from Others

This month’s #tsql2sday is hosted by the @AirborneGeek (t|b), who asks us to take a lesson from something frequently done by pilots – learning from accidents and mistakes done by others. As a long-time SQL Server Consultant DBA, I have learned from quite a lot of mistakes done (mostly) by others, seeing as a significant part of my job description is to come over and fix such mistakes. So, today I’ll use this opportunity to talk about one such interesting incident.

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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.

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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.

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