An especially clever community member was kind enough to reverse-engineer the video stream for me, and came up with a direct link to the PASS TV video stream for my Query Tuning Mastery: The Art and Science of Manhandling Parallelism talk, delivered at the PASS Summit last Thursday. I'm not sure how long this link will work, but I'd like to share ...

For the second year in a row, I was asked to deliver a 500-level ''Query Tuning Mastery'' talk in room 6E of the Washington State Convention Center, for the PASS Summit. (Here's some information about last year's talk, on workspace memory.) And for the second year in a row, I had to deliver said talk at 10:15 in the morning, in a room used as ...

What a rush. Standing on the stage in an almost-full 1,000-person room, I (very) momentarily wondered what I'd been thinking when I submitted a 500-level talk for the biggest SQL Server conference in the world. But despite a rough start--my laptop crashed and I had to reboot it two minutes into the talk--I found my rhythm and the entire 90 minutes ...

Everyone should know by now how really useful the DMVs dm_exec_query_stats, and dm_db_index_usage_stats and the associated DMFs for obtaining the SQL and XML plan: dm_exec_sql_text, dm_exec_query_plan, and dm_exec_text_query_plan. Of course it has been explained that dm_exec_query_stats is not a replacement for SQL Server Profiler and SQL Trace. ...

Many years ago, I attended a conference where a very highly respected Oracle performance expert advocated the use of logical IO count as a performance metric. The argument was that a logical IO is a fairly substantial operation relative to others. I suppose that detailed logical IO was already collected supported this. So why would logical IO be ...

How creative are you with manipulating your queries to produce more efficient plans? Try the following puzzle and e-mail your solution to me at [<do_not_mail> @ do_not_mail.com]. Make sure to include an explanation of why it works, as well as your mailing address. The best two solutions/explanations win a free copy of Expert SQL Server 2005 ...

Relative comparison is a simple matter of human nature. From early childhood we compare and contrast what we see in the world around us, building a means by which to rate what we experience. And as it turns out, this desire to discover top and bottom, rightmost and leftmost, or best and worst happens to extend quite naturally into business ...

A couple of days ago, Aaron Bertrand posted about a method for calculating medians in SQL Server 2005 using the ROW_NUMBER function in conjunction with the COUNT aggregate. This method (credited to Itzik Ben-Gan) is interesting, but I discovered an even better way to attack the problem in Joe Celko's Analytics and OLAP in SQL.Rather than using a ...

On October 20, 2004 -- two years ago -- I announced that I was considering writing my own query load testing tool.Clearly, my follow through on this promise has been incredibly delayed.  But all is not lost, and I'm happy to report that I am true to my word.  As of today, beta-1 of my new SQLQueryStress tool is available for ...

When working with SQL Server 2000, I used to have this little trick I'd pull out after exhausting all other ideas for tuning a query.  And I thought that my little trick was dead in SQL Server 2005, but thanks to fellow SQL Server MVP Rob Farley, I am officially reviving my trick from the dead here and now, in this blog post.... But first, ...