Hello All, I am looking for some general advice concerning views vs. tables.  I have several processes for which I have created multiple views.  In other words, View 2 depends on View1 and so on.  Some of these are nested 6-8 deep. I had some initial difficulty with unexpected join results (SQL choosing a different join than what ...

There were discussions on disk misalignment on this site. See my previous post on “Performance Impact of Disk Misalignment”, and Kevin Kline’s blog on “How to Improve Application and Database Performance up to 40% in One Easy Step”   But thanks to Jimmy May's PASS 2008 presentation on the I/O performance impact of disk partition ...

Below are the first performance numbers for the new AMD 45nm Opteron (Shanghai) relative to other recent AMD and Intel Xeon results. 4-way TPC-C Opteron 8360 Quad-core 2.5GHz (Barcelona) 2M L3, 471,883 (DL585G2) Opteron 8384 Quad-core 2.7GHz (Shanghai) 6M L3, 579,814 (DL585G2) Xeon 7350 Quad-core 2.93GHz (Tigerton) 2x4M L2, 407,079 ...

The RML utilities from PSS have just been updated to include support for SQL Server 2008 along with various enhancement and bug fixes.  If you don't know what the RML utilities are I suggest you have a look at this link and take a few minutes to download them and play around some. ...

Gross margin (also known as Gross profit margin or Gross profit rate) is defined as (Revenue – Cost of Sales)/Revenue. In terms of Adventure Works sample database we can write this in MDX as [Gross Margin] = ([Measures].[Internet Sales Amount] - [Measures].[Internet Total Product Cost]) / [Measures].[Internet Sales Amount]; While this ...

Almost a year ago now, I started a series of blog post on the bin packing problem. But after the first three posts, various reasons caused the research I still had to do for the fourth part to be massively delayed. It’s only now that I have finally found the time to finish my research and write up the fourth installment.   After a ...

For scalar values a*b is the same as b*a. (although we saw that performance of these two could be different in MDX in “Performance of multiplication in MDX” article). But if a and b are sets, then obviously results are different – since the order of tuples in the resulting set will be different. But does it matter if we were to perform some other ...

One of the most significant changes in Analysis Services 2008 was improving performance of MDX queries and calculations. In particular, query optimizer can choose block (a.k.a. subspace) computation mode in query plan more often than in AS2005, and usually using block/subspace computation mode brings performance orders of magnitude better than ...

Two weeks ago, we did the ''SQL 2008 Summit'' roadshow here in Sweden. We did 4 cities around Sweden in 4 days (http://www.expertzone.se/sql2k8/). It was a bit exhaustive, but even more fun - being able to travel and spend some time with persons wish I could meet more often (Kalen), others I meet regularly but only at workplace (Roger, ...

It seems like questions always come up about how to monitor memory.  But each time the question comes up, it’s slightly different.   Here’s a sort of FAQ for memory questions:   1.  How can I figure out memory and CPU consumption by database? a.  In SQL Server 2005, DMVs are of course the way to go.  Pre-SQL ...