SQL Server Performance Office Hours Episode 71

Chapters

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:01:58 – Travel Preferences
00:04:29 – Conference Locations
00:07:33 – ClickUp Overview
00:08:38 – Azure VM Issue
00:10:32 – Table Variables Discussion

Full Transcript

Your best friend, Erik Darling. Your best friend and monitoring tool mogul, ErikDarling here for an Office Hours episode. You may notice that my beard has gotten a little bit shorter. It got hot and I got annoyed and my face got itchy. So, I gave things a little… I’m going to start things fresh. I’m going to let things naturally come back to a more familiar bearded state.

But for now, we’re going to enjoy looking quite youthful and not having inches of gray hair pouring out of my chin. So, that’s nice. It’s Office Hours time where I answer five of your questions. I don’t have questions. I mean, I have questions. It’s not about anything you care about. Bigger questions in life. Down in the video description, if you want to ask me your questions, don’t ask me my questions. I’ll jump out a window.

The link to do that is down in the video description. There’s an Office Hours link. It’s got the words Office and Hours in it. If you click on that, it’ll bring you to a place where you can ask questions. There’s all sorts of other useful things down there too.

For example, if you’d like to hire me to do things to your SQL Server, you can do that. If you would like to purchase my training so you can get better at doing things to your SQL Server, you can also do that. If you like this channel in some way, shape, or form enough…

That you feel like giving me like four bucks a month to support my efforts here, you can do that. And, of course, I always do appreciate the channel numbers growing and exceeding my wildest expectations. So please do like, subscribe, tell a friend, and help me overtake that Amiga Repair channel once and for all.

I’m going to show Jim who’s boss. If you’re in the market for SQL Server performance monitoring, I have a completely free, completely open source tool.

I probably owe you some videos on the updates to that because there have been some really good ones lately. A lot of work on the UI, a lot of work on performance of the UI, and things like that. So the more time that I get to use it on client production servers, the better this thing turns out.

Because… You’re always your own worst critic. At least I hope I am anyway.

Anyway, let’s go answer some questions here. We’ve got them all lined up. And let’s see. Number one here. Now that you’ve done half a year of lectures, what would be your main takeaway from Domestic vs. International workshops?

And where would you like to go back to? So… I strongly prefer international travel for these things.

I like getting a bit further out of my comfort zone. This year I got to go to two new places. I got to go to Poland, where I’ve never been, and I got to go to Croatia, where I’ve never been.

You know, the downside is that you are a bit tethered to some conference stuff, so I don’t get to get out into things as much as I would like to, like if I were just traveling on vacation.

You know, there’s all sorts of stuff that I would like to see that I just usually don’t get around to. But I strongly prefer the international travel for conferences. And it’s not that I don’t love this great big country of ours.

It’s just that I live in New York City, and going to Chicago is cool, because Chicago is pretty well a city.

Stuff like that. But some of the smaller cities, it’s like you get there, and you’re like, I guess I’m just going to sit in this hotel bar and see what happens.

I don’t know. There’s just not a lot to do out in the world in some of the smaller venues. So I prefer the international travel, where I get to go to another capital-type city.

And I know that New York is not the capital of America, but it’s a pretty strong city as far as stuff to do goes. So when I travel, I like to get out into another city environment, I am not much of a country bumpkin.

But I would go back anywhere. Yeah, I would love to go back to Poland again. I did not get to see a ton of Wroclaw.

And I would love to get back to Croatia. I know that SQL Day does a SQL Day Lite, and this year it is in Gdansk.

But I think with all of my fancy family summer travel plans, getting back out to Poland after that might be a bit much on, I don’t know, my body.

So I don’t know if I’m going to make that one. But I would love to get back to… Really, I want to start doing more of the European conferences because they tend to be a bit larger.

If you go to American ones, you have some… You can go to…

You can get to some bigger stuff, right? Like SQLCon, FabCon looks pretty big down in Atlanta. And I love Atlanta. I don’t… I’d probably have to start saying nice things about fabric to get a green light on that one, but I don’t know.

And then, you know, you have PASS Summit out in Seattle. I dig Seattle. Seattle is a good city too. But, you know, like the Data Saturday things, they don’t tend to be like, you know, 24 or 500 people the way that some of the European ones are because, you know, they’re like yearly things that happen and they have a bit more draw to them.

Whereas like the smaller local events, you know, you get somewhere 100, 150 people. You know, stuff isn’t as big and festive and fun. So, you know, I think I would like to get back…

I want to do more of the European stuff, I think, in 2027, assuming that I’m allowed to go anywhere and do anything. I don’t know.

That was probably a much longer answer than I intended. I was kind of rambling there for a minute too. I don’t know. Sorry about that. I’m coming off a rotten sinus infection.

So if I make noises, just deal with it. What do you generally hear about ClickUp? Nothing. I don’t know.

I have like… I know like two people who use it to look at logs. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t hear a lot about it. This is not the forefront of where I spend my time. I don’t go around asking people about ClickHouse.

Neither. Yeah. I don’t know how to pronounce the first one. It kind of looks like the French word for other, but with some extra letters in it.

I never cared much for Aphex Twin. That was like pop music for me, you know. I never got into either one. That’s your thing.

Cool. I’ll turn it up. But not for me. Not for me. Hi, Eric. We have an Azure VM running SQL Server 2025 Enterprise. About a week ago, the VM unexpectedly shut down or restarted. According to Microsoft, it was triggered because the VM experienced excessively long disk IO waits. Have you seen this before?

And what kinds of issues could cause Azure to restart a VM under these circumstances? Boy, oh, boy. The more… The more… The more… The more… The more… The more…

The more… The more… The more… The more… The more… The more… The more… The more… The more…

The more… The more… The more… The more… The more… The more… The more… The more… The more… The more…

The more… The more… The more… The more… The more… The more… The more… The more… something bad happened. Microsoft’s just like, oh, it was long IO. Well, I don’t know. You’re responsible for the infrastructure. What could possibly cause long IO waits, Microsoft? I don’t know. Kick it to them. Why are you asking me what Azure does? Azure sucks. See, this is why I’m not going anywhere. Anyway, yeah, it’s a nightmare up there. Absolute malpractice. Are there any real workloads where table variables actually make sense? Yeah. Ones where you put a small amount of data in them at a very, very rapid pace and you don’t join them to any other tables.

That’s about it. There are, of course, all sorts of maybe strange edge cases and scenarios where you might find a table variable for some whatever reason gets you a better query plan than a temp table.

Maybe it’ll happen for you once in a while. It certainly happened to me once in a while. It’s more with table-valued parameters than I think with strict table variables. Because table-valued parameters for a long time, they got the sniff, the number of row sniff that table variables were not getting. So you would sometimes just get better plans out of those. But yeah, I mean, it’s really like you got to really put a lot of data into a lot of different table variables, really quickly for them to make sense. And, you know, where like just the overhead of maintaining and caching and creating statistics on temp tables is too much overhead for you. But those are really sort of niche-y edge case workloads or even just like small parts of a workload where you would have to be sort of careful. You would have to like really know like just like the temp tables were too much overhead for you.

Either your very, very high-scale, fast-paced workload or this one portion of your workload where you’re doing lots of tiny little things with table variables very quickly. I don’t know. Anyway, let’s see. You cover international travel. It’s a sad question about ClickHouse.

I just don’t… Again, I don’t talk to people who use too many weird databases. It’s… I don’t generally hear anything about it. Techno I don’t care about. People who got suckered into Azure. Table variables. All right. Well, I guess we’re doing that here. Before I start coughing again, I’m just going to wrap this one up. Thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed yourselves.

I hope you learned something. And I will see you in tomorrow’s video where we’re going to talk about a new peril with Insert Exec. So that’ll be fun. Fun for everyone, I think. All right. Thank you for watching.

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SQL Server Performance Office Hours Episode 71