SQL Server transactional replication has been a rather solid feature and works well for delivering data to reporting servers (among other things) in near real time. That said, it may not work too well when you need to perform massive updates on a published table, for instance, when you need to archive a large amount of data. It can take a long ...

When you write Powershell scripts and need to write a text file, you have a number of ways to accomplish that. The often suggested approach is to use cmdlets Add-Content or Out-File. Well, this is not news.   But some may not notice that these cmdlets are not there for performance. Sure, they are convenient. But if you need to write to a ...

Generating scripts through SMO can be as simple as walking down the database object tree and applying the Script() method to each scriptable object. Well, that is until you start to try it on a database that has a large number of objects (say a few thousands), and the long wait the becomes rather frustrating. I’m not talking about such ...

This is a quick update on the T-SQL exercise I posted a few days ago. The goal was to write a simple T-SQL script to generate and load 4,000,000 rows into a table so that the following query would produce the worst performance, i.e. take longest time to finish:   DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS go SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.test;   The ...

Here is a T-SQL scripting exercise in case you have a few minutes to spare or are bored with whatever else you are doing.    Objective The task is to write a simple T-SQL script to generate and load 4,000,000 rows into a test table. The objective is to make the following simple test query to have the worst performance in terms of ...