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• Elephant in the room: TPC-E

  Over the past few months in several semi-formal occasions, I ran into folks from your well-known vendors (minus Microsoft). Some of the folks were from the vendors’ performance labs and were involved in conducting benchmark tests and publishing benchmark Read More... Posted Saturday, January 07, 2012 1:21 AM by Linchi Shea | 10 Comments Filed under: Rant, Benchmark

• Creating features for 1% of the users

  While at PASS Summit 2011 in Seattle, I had a conversation with an attendee from one of the largest US companies. As expected and like any of the largest US companies, this company has multiple DBMS platforms. The conversation then turned to how SQL Server Read More... Posted Monday, October 17, 2011 6:50 PM by Linchi Shea | 8 Comments Filed under: Cluster, Rant

• The Transact-SQL Prime Directive – a bad example

  A while back, I ranted that the design and implementation of Transact-SQL should be guided by a prime directive that guarantees no interference with the flow of set-based data in Transact-SQL. That was primarily motivated by the fact that no such guarantee Read More... Posted Friday, December 18, 2009 1:12 PM by Linchi Shea | 2 Comments Filed under: T-SQL, Rant, General trends, Language Design

• Please keep the system stored procedures updated

  One of the things I like about SQL Server (and Sybase for that matter) is that it comes with tons of system stored procedures. Who doesn't find procs like sp_who, sp_help, and and sp_helprotect indispenable? But unfortunately it seems to me that Microsoft Read More... Posted Thursday, May 07, 2009 5:46 PM by Linchi Shea | 5 Comments Filed under: Rant

• Document the locking behavior

  In a multi-process/multi-thread system, locking is central to maintain data consistency and keep things in order. It is inevitably at the root of almost all the concurrency and scalability problems. To understand the behavior of such a system and to troubleshoot Read More... Posted Thursday, April 02, 2009 8:58 PM by Linchi Shea | 24 Comments Filed under: Rant

• There is a limit to set based solutions

  It typically goes like this. You started with procedural solutions because that’s a ‘natural’ way of solving a problem. Then, you read articles and books and went to presentations, and everyone was preaching set-based solutions. You felt ashamed and started Read More... Posted Friday, December 12, 2008 1:18 PM by Linchi Shea | 29 Comments Filed under: Rant

• MSIZAP is Your Friend

  If you ask for my opinion on Windows Installer, I’d have to think what polite words to use. But almost every Microsoft product uses it, and that includes SQL Server. So we are stuck with it and have to live with it for now and for the forseeable future. Read More... Posted Tuesday, August 12, 2008 12:18 PM by Linchi Shea | 4 Comments Filed under: Tools, Rant

• Drive letters should go

  Recently, I was involved in designing a SQL2005 cluster. Let’s just say that it was going to have many more nodes until we found that we had to scale down to a 3+1 cluster because of drive letter limitation. The annoying thing is that even with a 3+1 Read More... Posted Friday, February 29, 2008 5:27 PM by Linchi Shea | 6 Comments Filed under: Storage, Rant, General trends

• You Gotta Stop Writing Tautologies

  Windows performance monitor is an excellent tool. But the online explanations for many perfmon counters often drive me nuts. Take the counter "SQLServer:Databases\Log Growths" as an example. Its explain text is "Total number of log growths for this database." Read More... Posted Thursday, February 21, 2008 6:44 PM by Linchi Shea | 2 Comments Filed under: Rant