Lately I have had the opportunity to work with performance tuning of queries running on the Azure Parallel Data Warehouse (Azure PDW). This has been interesting in that everything you thought you knew about SQL Server DMV’s, writing queries and overall performance tuning is just a little bit different. My goal was to write a query to show me what …

Azure PDW What is Active Read more »

Being day 24 of the DBCC Command month at SteveStedman.com, today’s featured DBCC Command is DBCC SHRINKDATABASE. When I first heard about DBCC Shrink Database (many years ago), I immediately thought “what a great feature, run this every night when the system load is low, and the database will be smaller, perform better, and all around be in better shape”. …

DBCC ShrinkDatabase Read more »

After my CTE presentation at SQL Saturday 108 in Redmond, I was asked many questions, and received several great suggestions from people.  Based on that feedback, I am updating my presentation for SQL Saturday 114 in Vancouver to include some additional content. One question was how does the performance compare between a recursive CTE to generate a hierarchical tree path …

CTE Hierarchy compared to the alternative Read more »

Working on a new report for the SQL Server Health reports, I needed to display the amount of free disk space on a SQL Server. EXEC MASTER..Xp_fixeddrives; Which was useful if I just wanted to look, but I needed to use the results in a query, and I didn’t want to put the results into a temp table, so here is …

Determining free disk space with TSQL Read more »

Is it a good idea to run DBCC SHRINKDATABASE regularly? Download the sample file ShrinkSample. This article and samples apply to SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2008R2. This really depends on a number of factors, but generally the answer is NO, it is not a good idea to run DBCC SHRINKDATABASE regularly. For the purpose of this article, I am …

Index Fragmentation and SHRINKDATABASE Read more »